Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
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...
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.
Allen Ginsberg
[Poet and writer, b. 1926, Newark, New Jersey, d. 1997, New York.]
We are all exposed to the flash bulb of death.
Tom Waits
[Musician, b. 1949, Pomona, California, lives in Sonoma County, California.]
Photos are profound because they have such short lives. They are more like fingerprints, dead leaves, rain puddles, or the corpses of flies.
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.
Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
...the world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it.
The photograph annihilates the person.
