"All my portraits are self-portraits," Dick was fond of saying, and there is truth in that about his portraits, as well as about the nature of all portraiture, whether in painting, photography, or even biography.
— Philip Gefter, What Becomes a Legend Most: A Biography of Richard Avedon
“The audience’s brain does the cooking and keeps seeing relationships,” he says.
— Alissa Wilkinson, "‘Eno’ Review: Creativity, 52 Billion Billion Ways," The New York Times
You've probably seen the phrase Al slop already, the term most people have settled on for the confusing and oftentimes disturbing pictures of Jesus and flight attendants and veterans that are filling up Facebook right now. But the current universe of slop is much more vast than that. There's Google Slop, YouTube slop. TIkTok slop. Marvel slop, Taylor Swift slop, Netflix slop. One could argue that slop has become the defining "genre" of the 2020s. But even though we've all come around to this idea, l haven't seen anyone actually define it. So today I'm going to try.
Content slop has three important characteristics. The first being that, to the user, the viewer, the customer, it feels worthless. This might be because it was clearly generated in bulk by a machine or because of how much of that particular content is being created.
— Ryan Broderick via @jenniferxdaniel
WIFE IS MAKING QUARTERS OF HERSELF
— Flyer by Alan Wagner via @welcome.jpeg
He was photographing the medium of photography as much as he was photographing the subject before the camera.
— Philip Gefter, What Becomes a Legend Most: A Biography of Richard Avedon
Work grows out of work.
— Stephen Shore, Modern Instances
It's not like we're throwing mom out, it's just her things.
— C*
We did it Joe.
— Lily whispering to me as I put Wally over my shoulder and he did a big poop
How you spend your days is how you spend your life.
— @harshalduddalwar
Authentic teak from Surrender Deck USS Missouri (BB 63) Tokyo Bay - September 2, 1945
Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz signs the surrender document.
— Lucite block with wood fragment
1972 Chicago Stock Exchange Building Lucite Block Souvenirs
— eBay listing
I'd rather be a sparrow than a snail.
— Simon & Garfunkel, "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)"
Both document and monument.
— Philip Gefter, What Becomes a Legend Most: A Biography of Richard Avedon
Szarkowski and I once discussed what distinguishes a photograph from an illustration. He said, "an illustration is a picture whose problems were solved before the picture was made."
— Stephen Shore, Modern Instances
And, you know, we knock on wood, wherever we may have wood.
— Donald Trump, CNN Presidential Debate
This time, when I seated myself across from his desk and he asked me how things were, I told him my father had just passed away, a year after my mother. He said, "You know, some people believe you don't become your own person until both of your parents have died." This meant more to me than all the sincerely offered condolences from friends.
— Stephen Shore, Modern Instances
Carry that weight a long time.
— The Beatles, "Carry That Weight"
Like Bobby Troup's rolling list of place names, this has some of the incantational quality seen in American poetry from Walt Whitman to Allen Ginsberg.
— Stephen Shore, Modern Instances
No anecdote better epitomizes this paradox than the one recounted about Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein. When confronted by someone who claimed that the portrait didn't look anything like Stein, Picasso said with imposing confidence: “It will.”
— Philip Gefter, What Becomes a Legend Most: A Biography of Richard Avedon
One of the threads running through the history of the medium is the redefinition of meaningful content. Photographers find meaning in something where it hadn't been recognized before, and then, over time, that content itself becomes a convention. And when it becomes a convention, it lacks the immediacy of the original picture.
— Stephen Shore, Modern Instances