Martha Rosler Quotes

#1. All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.

Aristotle.

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

Martha Rosler

#3. Climbing's always been a massive hobby of mine up until, kind of, recent times when I've had family, but no, it's been a driving passion in my life, and, uh, I've always wanted to climb the Matterhorn. It was the mountain that, sort of, inspired me to climb, as a youngster.

Andy Serkis

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

Martha Rosler

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. What makes a narcissistic mother so scary? Her absolute power and controlling influence. A narcissistic mother is your only 'friend,' at least until you're old enough to go to school.

Koren Zailckas

#8. The whole point of social media is continuity and continual engagement.

Clara Shih

#9. 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

#10. I'd feel wasted and burnt, having wasted my time and my body and my energy and y words and my soul.

Ned Vizzini

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

Martha Rosler

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. But the best I've known
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies.

Rupert Brooke

#15. A painting is life and a painting is death ... the picture is our own legacy left by tomorrow's dead for tomorrow's living.

Ivan Albright

#16. 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

#17. 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