Martha Rosler Quotes

#1. The question at hand is the danger posed to truth by computer-manipulated photographic imagery. How do we approach this question in a period in which the veracity of even the straight, unmanipulated photograph has been under attack for a couple of decades.

Martha Rosler

#2. Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.)

Martha Rosler

#3. I was concerned with something like the notion of 'language speaking the subject,' and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.

Martha Rosler

#4. Are we asserting the easy dominion of our civilization over all times and all places, as signs that we casually absorb as a form of loot?

Martha Rosler

#5. Any familiarity with photographic history shows that manipulation is integral to photography.

Martha Rosler

#6. So much of my work involved the Vietnam War that it would have been obscene to show it in a gallery. But now, it's different; it's important to remember and to enable the young to discover what to some of us is still so present.

Martha Rosler

#7. Artists and activists offend the sensibilities of the rule-bound when they interfere with people"s ability to accept things in the private realm as long as they are not made part of the structure of the law.

Martha Rosler

#8. Just going out on a foray to assemble a collection of street trophies about this or that running social sore can't be effective - and never was.

Martha Rosler

#9. Photography [can] be seen as a system of representation that you bring to bear on other systems.

Martha Rosler

#10. How useful are documentary photographs if there is no follow up, no way of knowing what happened next in the story?

Martha Rosler