Italo Calvino
[Writer, b. 1923, Santiago de la Vegas, Cuba, d. 1985, Siena, Italy.]

 Whatever person you decide to photograph, or whatever thing, you must go on photographing it always, exclusively, at every hour of the day and night. 
 The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. 
 Perhaps true, total photography, he thought, is a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations. 
 Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images. 
 In the photograph we are looking at something that has been and is no longer there… 
 …the fixity of the image is death, hence our inner reluctance to be photographed, as well as our submission to it. 
 Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left—or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story “The Adventure of a Photographer”) 
 A photograph is a trace of the luminous rays emanating from something that exists, something that is there. 
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