A Quote by Allan Sekula
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.
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Photography's relationship with pornography is as old as photography. That kind of unholy relationship is formed from the very beginning, and there's a reason why: it's thoroughly enjoyable to be that voyeuristic. Voyeurism is a very old modality, and most of the history of photography is in some way related voyeurism.
new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.
I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.
Just as little as terror - not even the terror of war - can save the world, just as little can hate ever be anything uplifting. Love is the only firm ground for peace - not only love for one's fellowmen, but first of all, love of one's country.
When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder ... that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.
There is no place for nostalgia in a progressive world. The new school not only ignores nostalgia, but condemns it. The world of yesterday is becoming an isolated world of remembrances and echoes so forbidden that, to decorate the present with it, you must often do so with a sense of humor or belong to a select group.
Many people in this world do jobs that are dangerous and where their life is at risk and they feel that there is some kind of value to their job I guess that's how I feel about what I do. There is a social function to documentary photography that is very important and it requires people to take risks.
Teaching needs an ecosystem that supports evidence-based practice. It will need better systems to disseminate the results of research more widely, but also a better understanding of research, so that teachers can be critical consumers of evidence.
As a communication medium, social media is a critical tool for terror groups to exploit.
What is envy? It is nothing but passive jealousy. Maybe jealousy is too strong a phenomenon; envy is a little passive. The difference may be of degrees, but it is not of quality, it is only of quantity. Envy can become jealousy at any moment; envy is just jealousy in progress. Mind has to drop all envies and jealousies.
What's great about documentary genre, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of "documentary."
Now documentary evidence is acceptable. What does that mean? If you have documentary evidence that a person served as a guard in one of the death camps and the documents have been authenticated, that is grounds to charge the person with crimes against humanity. And that's why you see the spate of trials previously, for example, in the '70s and the '80s, even in the low '90s. That was not the case until the change in the law.
Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.
'America 24/7' will be a landmark series in documentary photography and the watershed event of the new digital photography age.
Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.
The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality . . . the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, furfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega . . . critical point simultaneously of emergence and emersion, of maturation and evasion.
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