Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
… I wrote myself in as the lover. Sometimes, the obsession lasted for years. It was photography as the sublimation of sex, a means of seduction, and a way to remain a crucial part of my subjects’ lives. A chance to touch someone with a camera rather than physically.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
That erotic and pornographic photographs were produced almost from the medium’s inception should come as no surprise. That it does so is a testimonial only to the near-total elision of this fact from the standard histories in the field... Indeed, it seems reasonable to assume that almost as soon as there were viable daguerreotypes, there were pornographic ones.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
The only thing we photographers really want more than life, more than sex, more than anything, is to be invisible.
Rankin (John Rankin Waddell)
[Photographer, b. 1966, Glasgow, Scotland, lives in London.]
I use the technique of being cheeky or rude or asking [subjects] to do ridiculous things. For example, I might talk about my sex life, or their sex life… I might say, “I’m imagining you being fucked up the arse with a big black dildo.”
Anaïs Nin
[Writer, b. 1903, Neuilly, France, d. 1977, Los Angeles.]
I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.
Robert Mapplethorpe
[Photographer, b. 1946, Floral Park, Long Island, d. 1989, Boston, Massachusetts.]
When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
[The pornographic photograph] is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex…
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
Images have become our true sex objects. It is this promiscuity and the ubiquity of images, this viral contamination of images which are the fatal characteristics of our culture.
