Politics & Power Quote by Andres Serrano

Serrano’s line is a provocation dressed as a plain fact: you don’t opt into politics; politics opts into you. Coming from a photographer whose career has leaned on confrontation and the policing of bodies, “being born” reads less like philosophy than like an indictment of how power assigns meaning on sight. The phrase “political act” flips the usual script. Acts imply agency, choice, even strategy. Birth is none of those. That mismatch is the point: in a society that racializes everything from credibility to vulnerability, a person of color is treated as if they arrived with a platform, a threat profile, a set of assumptions. Existence gets misread as a statement.

The intent is to expose how “neutral” public life isn’t neutral at all. Serrano isn’t claiming identity as performance; he’s insisting that institutions, media, and everyday interactions interpret certain identities as inherently charged. It’s a compact way to describe why some people can move through the world as individuals while others are constantly drafted into representing a category, a “community,” or a controversy. The subtext is fatigue as much as anger: the burden of being made symbolic before you’ve spoken.

Context matters, too. Serrano’s work has repeatedly triggered moral panic and gatekeeping about whose images are acceptable, whose bodies can be depicted without scandal. In that light, the quote doubles as an artist’s defense: if the culture insists that race is political, then showing it honestly isn’t “bringing politics into art.” It’s admitting what’s already there.