Sekula Quotes

#1. The only objective truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something ... was somewhere and took a picture.

Allan Sekula

#2. How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?

Allan Sekula

#3. Don't call me that." She looked down.
I tipped her face back up. "What?"
"Baby."
Shit. I called her baby?
"Why not?" I asked. I was supposed to tell her she'd been hearing things. That grief was making her cuckoo.
"Because I like it.

Cambria Hebert

#4. You have chosen the Evening; but my love is given to the Morning.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#5. ...the first Allied troops cantered eastward in the rollicking high spirits obligatory at the beginning of all military debacles.

Rick Atkinson

#6. A country of free men is not free if they are owned by somebody else.

Joseph P. Sekula

#7. Black-and-white photos tell the truth. That's why insurance companies use them.

Allan Sekula

#8. Life's the sum total of all our small mistakes, little tragedies, bad choices. Addition on top of addition. They pile up and pile up until the cost of keeping up appearances is too high and the weight is just too much. Then: collapse.

Lauren Oliver

#9. 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.

Allan Sekula

#10. 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.

Allan Sekula

#11. Freedom ... Freedom does not exist with personal responsibility!

Joseph P. Sekula

#12. The making of a human likeness on film is a political act.

Allan Sekula

#13. Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.

Allan Sekula

#14. There is never an end, just a new beginning.

Joseph P. Sekula

#15. The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability.

Allan Sekula

#16. The very fact that you are a complainer, shows that you deserve your lot.

James Allen

#17. Jesus Christ is my savior, not the government.

Joseph P. Sekula