“….I don’t have a fixed idea of photography, I don’t have a theory of photography, I don’t think there is “one” […] and that itself is something that’s fascinating about it […] it seems to elude definition […] and that’s a source of constant renewal.”
"Photography really becomes accepted as an art precisely at the point where art is questioning itself."
"It’s actually a tiny fragment of photographs that get made [as] and in the name of art […] so the arguing for photography’s artistic merit misses the fact that the energy in photography and the significance of photography for art, I think comes from the fact that it can’t entirely belong to art."
"…I think always part of the problem when discussing photography is, we in the present always want to think that our problems are bigger and more original and more specific to our time, and more rooted in the very latest technologies - or mutations in culture - than at any time before - and I think that amnesia is a problem...so I am always interested in the history of the anxieties and also the excitements and the challenges we feel about photography"
"…those patterns that we now think as somehow rooted in algorithms, that’s just ideology, that’s the conformism of ideology […] I think of Ai as the perfecting of ideology"
"I do think about photography having this easy - sometimes too easy - relation to whatever context it's in; If you see a painting in a book, you know that the PAINTING is somewhere else; You are looking at a reproduction […] You’re not thinking where are those PHOTOGRAPHS; they just inhabit the page, the belong to the page… in the same way that they belong to a billboard or they belong to a screen […] I am fascinated in the idea that photographs can live in different ways"
"...he (Jeff Wall) said ' something interesting happened with cultural institutions around the turn of the millennium; they went from thinking that art can be for anyone, to thinking that they must be for everyone ‘ […] It was well intended; cultural institutions should be inclusive, they shouldn’t be high-minded […] but within that was a kind of drive towards populism, and populism often means oversimplifying things - not allowing people the space of ambiguity that is one of the gifts of art […] I don’t mean by ambiguity; obscurity or difficulty, but the fact that different people are going to have different responses to it and that all of those responses are important. […] The kind of mental and cultural movement that happens with ambiguity is the only way that culture moves. Otherwise it’s just a curator or an institution saying ’I think this is what the public wants at this point in time - let's give it to them.' That looks like it’s responsive and inclusive, but it’s also patronising and it’s limiting at precisely the point where it thinks it's opening things up. All of this is a very very delicate balance […] and i think about these questions…all the time […] this is complicated and its one of the most pressing points in culture."
"People think of creativity being attached to ego, and it's why society has turned the word CREATIVE into a noun."
“Protect your curiosity at all costs. it’s a very fragile thing. When you’re feeling like you’re not making headway, or you’re down a kind of dead-end, curiosity is the first thing to die and you can get very existential very very quickly […] Curiosity needs feeding […] It needs protecting.”
