Susan Sontag:
[T]he very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art – it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure — photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac’s Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget’s Paris.
Rod Slemmons:
It has become increasingly difficult to see photographs as the visible world has been almost completely plastered over with lenticular representations of itself. Strangely, as the photograph becomes the world, it disappears — or perhaps more accurately, it loses its informative opacity. And because photographs look so much like seeing, this process threatens our possession of our own vision.
Critical Issues 