Allan Sekula Quotes
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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.
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The making of a human likeness on film is a political act.
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How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?
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The only objective truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something... was somewhere and took a picture.
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Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.
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Black-and-white photos tell the truth. That's why insurance companies use them.
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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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The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability.