Günter Grass
[Writer, b. 1927, Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk, Poland), d. 2015, Lübeck, Germany.]

 [To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images. 
 I couldn’t believe it. First, incredulity, when the concentration camp pictures startled me with their black-and-whiteness; then, speechlessness. 
 What novel—or what else in the world—can have the epic scope of a photograph album? May our Father in Heaven, the untiring amateur who each Sunday snaps us from above, at an unfortunate angle that makes for hideous foreshortening, and pastes our pictures, properly exposed or not, in his album, guide me safely through this album of mine... 
 If there is a hell in wait for us, I know what one of the more fiendish torments will be: they will shut up the naked soul in a room with the photographs of his day: Quick, turn on the pathos: O man beneath the glare of flash bulbs, O man standing erect by the leaning tower of Pisa. O photomaton man who must expose his right ear if he is to be worthy of a passport.