Brian Duffy
[Photographer, b. 1933, London, d. 2010, London.]

 Photography was dead by 1972. Everything had been resolved between 1839 and 1972. Every picture after ‘72, I have seen pre-‘72. Nothing new. But it took me some time to detect its death. The first person who twigged was Henri Cartier-Bresson. He just stopped—and started painting and drawing. God, he was useless. 

Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]

 …the only journey now possible seems to be the one found inside signs and images—in a destruction of direct experience. 

Marcel Duchamp
[Artist, b. 1887, Blainville, France, d. 1968, Neilly-sur-Seine, France.]

 You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz) 

Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]

 You must not trample on other people’s secret gardens. You must remember: to suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy. 

Nhem En
[Photographer, b. 1961, Kampong Leng, Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia, lives in Cambodia.]

 My only job was to photograph them, and it was someone else who tortured and killed these people. As a photographer, I had no right to beat, torture, or kill prisoners. I could not touch them. (En, official photographer at Khmer Rouge torture center Tuol Sleng, estimates he took photographs of 10,000 people arriving at the center. Eight survived.) 

Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]

 I am trying here to say something about the despised, the defeated, the alienated. About death and disaster, about the wounded, the crippled, the helpless, the rootless, the dislocated. About finality. About the last ditch. 

Rainer Maria Rilke
[Writer and poet, b. 1875, Prague, d. 1926, Montreux, Switzerland.]

 Oh quickly disappearing photograph in my more slowly disappearing hand. 

Christian Metz
[Writer and film theorist, b. 1931, Béziers, France, lives in France.]

 The person who has been photographed, not the total person, is dead, dead for having been seen. 
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