“This article appeared in a catalogue accompanying a pair of one-person exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1976. Fred Lonidier’s Health and Safety Game and Philip Steinmetz’s Somebody’s Making a Mistake. David Ross, the museum’s director of television and film, curated the exhibition. Early on, the decision was made to produce an exhibition catalogue that worked against the high art fetish of limited “quality reproduction.” That is, the catalogue’s form (newsprint, lots of critical text) and presentation (it was both used as an exhibition announcement and was available for free at the museum) were intended polemically. Following Walter Benjamin, these artists see the political value of photography in its reproducibility and in its “bracketing” with speech or text.”
Allan Sekula