Claude Lévi-Strauss
[Anthropologist, b. 1908, Brussels, Belgium, d. 2009, Paris.]

 [Photography] remains servile to a “thoughtless” vision of the world… As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it. 
 How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time… 
 Perhaps the public imagines that the charms of the savages can be appropriated through the medium of these photographs. Not content with having eliminated the savage life, and unaware even of having done so, it feels the need feverishly to appease the nostalgic cannibalism of history with the shadows of those history has already destroyed. 
 With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.