Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
All photographs are
memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
[Philosopher, b. 1889, Vienna, Austria, d. 1951, Cambridge, England.]
If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images...
Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.
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.
Óscar Muñoz
[Artist, b. 1951, Popayán, Colombia, lives in Cali, Colombia.]
Of those individuals who have disappeared and died, the only document that can attest to their existence—in addition to those mementos sometimes preserved by their families—is photography.
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.
