Abigail Solomon-Godeau famous quotes

The thing itself is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer's Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.
-- Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#Waiting #Culture #World

In the final analysis, photography... is ever a hireling, ever the hired gun.
-- Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#Photography #Gun #Finals

As Plato insisted two thousand years ago, it is not by means of the image that moral, ethical, or political knowledge is produced.
-- Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#Plato #Mean #Years

Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode.
-- Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#Photography #Art #Exhausted

... photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself.
-- Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#Photography #Self #Cameras

Art photography, although long since legitimized by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the arriviste. Inasmuch as one of those rituals consists of the establishment of suitable ancestry, a search for distinguished bloodlines, it inevitably happens that photographic history and criticism are more concern with notions of tradition and continuity than with those of rupture and change.
-- Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#Photography #Art #Long

While the aesthetics of consumption (photographic or otherwise) requires a heroicized myth of the artist, the exemplary practice of the player-off codes requires only an operator, a producer, a scriptor, or a pasticheur.
-- Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#Artist #Player #Practice

Salvation, the prophets tell us, is preconditioned by repentance. The redeeming act of God waits upon man's initiative.

I will definitely attempt to sail around the world again. In fact, I can't wait for the chance to try again.

Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness, if you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. ... their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis ...

The university is our culture's assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.

The Civic Culture (and The Civic Culture Revisited) remains the best study of comparative political culture in our time.

Film is very much a universal and common voice, and we can't limit it to one particular culture.

The exclusion of true esoteric religion has been the business of the State since ancient times. At first this was done via the establishment of the popular idealism of exoteric religious institutions in league with the State. But in modern times the same process is done by the strategic exclusion of conventional religious cultism, mystical idealism, and higher evolutionary Wisdom from the mechanisms of popular culture.

I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.

Priests might divide the world into good and bad. In battle there was strong and weak and nothing else.

Let me tell you, though: being the smartest boy in the world wasn’t easy. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. On the contrary, it was a huge burden. First, there was the task of keeping my brain perfectly protected. My cerebral cortex was a national treasure, a masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel of brains. This was not something that could be treated frivolously. If I could have locked it in a safe, I would have. Instead, I became obsessed with brain damage.