'Late Night Stress' + Quotes

 

On Photography by Susan Sontag

• “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe”

• “Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging.”

Revisiting Carrie Mae Weem’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series” by Jacqui Palumbo for Artsy

• “Weem’s black-and-white photographs are like mirrors, each reflecting a collective experience: how selfhood shifts through passage of time; the sudden distance between people, both passable and impassable; the roles that women accumulate and oscillate between; how life emanates from the small space we occupy in the world.”

• “Everyone can relate to this work,” Sann said. “It’s not just black women; it’s white women, Asian women. Men can see women in their lives — memories from their childhood or scenes from their marriage or their family life. It’s so universal and yet representation like this is so rare.”

The Cindy Sherman Effect by Phoebe Hoban for Art News

• “A number of younger artists are very much indebted to Sherman in their exploration of not just identity but also the nature of representation. Now we all take it for granted that a photograph can be Photoshopped. We live in the era of YouTube fame and reality-TV shows and makeovers, where you can be anything you want to be any minute of the day, and artists are responding to that.”

• “No wonder the work of so many artists parallels Sherman’s, or at least mines similar conceptual veins: role-playing and the nature of identity; sexual and cultural stereotypes; the pressure to conform to the images of perfection promulgated through television, film, and advertising.”