Quotes by
Julian Rodriguez

The camera that Curtis carried with him was in itself a symbol of white man’s dominance. In the face of its gaze the subjects muster what pride they have left, they show bitterness in defeat. The camera pins down the great chiefs like butterflies.

Heartfield was one of the most vocal anti-Nazi’s alive at the time, a prophet of the impending doom, but startlingly in 1940, as if to temper his communist tendencies, he was arrested by British police and imprisoned as an enemy ‘alien’.

Brandt, in common with many other photographers, later preferred not to admit to the constructed nature of some of his key pictures, many of which had by then taken their rightful place in the canon of social documentary – for the idea that ‘documentary’ photography can’t include setting up pictures should have been thrown out with the maid’s bathwater.

Newhall acknowledged both Weston’s and Adams’ help in preparing the 1937 (History of Photography) show. Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray (both adopted as ‘Americans’ for the purpose of history) also ‘assisted’. All these practitioners found themselves in the enviable position of helping to write themselves into history. I am not suggesting a conspiracy theory, but I simply want to emphasise that a small, all-powerful, museum-backed clique fashioned the medium’s ‘aesthetic history’.