Allan Sekula quotes

Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.
-- Allan Sekula

#Photography #Envy #Understanding

The only objective truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something... was somewhere and took a picture.
-- Allan Sekula

#Objective Truth #Photograph #Offers

The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability.
-- Allan Sekula

#Utterance #Messages #Photograph

Black-and-white photos tell the truth. That's why insurance companies use them.
-- Allan Sekula

#Black And White #Use #Telling The Truth

Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist.
-- Allan Sekula

#Art #Self #Expression

How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?
-- Allan Sekula

#Photography #Memories #Historical

The making of a human likeness on film is a political act.
-- Allan Sekula

#Political #Film #Humans

Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.
-- Allan Sekula

#Photography #Promise #Mastery

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.

To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.

The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.

What is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world? It has been suggested that these shapes and images are underworld characters, the inhabitants of the vast common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control. It may be they are. The degree of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed would point in that direction.

However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.

When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).

How do I think of you? As someone I want to be with. As someone as young as me, but "older," if that makes sense. As someone I like to look at, not just because you're good to look at, but because just looking at you makes me smile and feel happier. As someone who knows her mind and who I envy for that. As someone who is strong in herself without seeming to need anyone else to help her. As someone who makes me thinks and unsettles me in a way that makes me feel more alive.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.