Martha Rosler Quotes

I was concerned with something like the notion of 'language speaking the subject,' and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.

So much of my work involved the Vietnam War that it would have been obscene to show it in a gallery. But now, it’s different; it’s important to remember and to enable the young to discover what to some of us is still so present.

Photography [can] be seen as a system of representation that you bring to bear on other systems.

Any familiarity with photographic history shows that manipulation is integral to photography.

Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.)

The question at hand is the danger posed to truth by computer-manipulated photographic imagery. How do we approach this question in a period in which the veracity of even the straight, unmanipulated photograph has been under attack for a couple of decades.

The exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting - and careerism.

Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-Critical Art ‘Survive’?

Just going out on a foray to assemble a collection of street trophies about this or that running social sore can't be effective - and never was.

How useful are documentary photographs if there is no follow up, no way of knowing what happened next in the story?

Are we asserting the easy dominion of our civilization over all times and all places, as signs that we casually absorb as a form of loot?