Lucy R. Lippard Quotes & Sayings

Given the lack of public skills in reading photographs, given that photographic content is sometimes buried in beauty, contemporary landscape photographers are often condemned to making pretty pictures. Dramatic clouds and sifting light can overwhelm more mundane information. Yet who can resist beautiful landscape pictures of one kind or another? Not I. — Lucy R. Lippard

Men have dominated the field of landscape photography just as they have dominated the land itself. Thus shooting a virgin landscape has been man's work - hunting, not gardening. — Lucy R. Lippard

An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage. — Lucy R. Lippard

I intensely dislike the word 'critic,' because it puts you in an antagonistic position to artists. I've learned everything that I know about art from artists ... I see myself as an advocate and an activist and a writer. — Lucy R. Lippard

Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around. If we spent half the energy looking at our own neighborhoods, we'd probably learn twice as much. — Lucy R. Lippard

The camera was another weapon in the wars of domination. — Lucy R. Lippard

A great many contemporary artists from hugely diverse backgrounds are currently approaching the prospect of cultural mixing ... — Lucy R. Lippard

There is indeed something omnivorous about the act of photography. It offers a way of responding to everything about everything. — Lucy R. Lippard

Despite having been awarded the dubious honor of arthood, all photography is still perceived as having one foot in the real world, a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude, no matter how often it is demonstrated that photographs can and do lie. — Lucy R. Lippard

I must admit to a personal lack of sympathy with women who have themselves photographed in black stockings, garter belts and boots, with bare breasts, bananas, and coy, come-hither glances ... A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men's use of women for sexual titillation from women's use of women to expose that insult. — Lucy R. Lippard

Photographers find themselves directly in competition with mass media's misrepresentations of women. So the photographic terrain is particularly contested from a political point of view. — Lucy R. Lippard

A piece of paper or a photograph is as much an object, or as 'material' as a ton of lead. — Lucy R. Lippard

Why are we still afraid of being other than men? Women are still in hiding. — Lucy R. Lippard