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.
Joan Didion
[Writer, b. 1934, Sacramento, California, lives in New York.]
…if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table.
Corinne Day
[Photographer, b. 1962, Ealing, West London, d. 2010, Denham, England.]
[My brain tumor] was like a bungee jump into hell, like falling and falling forever. It was terrifying, I gave Mark my camera, and told him, “Photograph everything.”
David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]
One terrible truth about photographs is that they can only ever show us
what happened, never what is happening or will happen. They are always about something that is
gone, and so are in league with death.
Rainer Maria Rilke
[Writer and poet, b. 1875, Prague, d. 1926, Montreux, Switzerland.]
Oh quickly disappearing photograph
in my more slowly disappearing hand.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Life is a movie. Death is a photograph.
John Updike
[Writer, b. 1932, Shillington, Pennsylvania, d. 2009, Boston, Massachusetts.]
A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.
Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
I never photograph anything I don’t believe in. If I love working with death, it’s because even in death I find this power of reality that no sculptor or painter could recreate, not even a Michelangelo or a Da Vinci.
