Vince Aletti on photography, at the symposium on the current state of the field (of photography), held at SFMOMA in April 2010, was the first in a series of public programs on photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

"If absolute truth were the only thing photography had to offer, it would have disappeared a century ago. Photography isn't merely a window on the world, it's a portal into the unconscious, wide open to fantasies, nightmares, obsessions, and the purest abstraction, as envisioned by Julia Margaret Cameron, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Joel-Peter Witkin, Laurie Simmons, and Adam Fuss."
-Vince Aletti, formerly the art editor and photography critic at the Village Voice, reviews photo exhibitions for the "Goings on About Town" section of the New Yorker and photo books for Photograph. He was the co-curator of the International Center of Photography's 2009 Year of Fashion, including the traveling exhibition Avedon Fashion 1944-2000.