Italo Calvino
[Writer, b. 1923, Santiago de la Vegas, Cuba, d. 1985, Siena, Italy.]
…the fixity of the image is death, hence our inner reluctance to be photographed, as well as our submission to it.
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.
Sabrina Harman
[U.S. military guard at Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq, b. 1978, Lorton, Virginia, lives in Virginia.]
On June 23 I saw my first dead body I took pictures! The other day I heard my first grenade go off. Fun!
(To her father, June 23, 2003, written from Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq)
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.
Michael Lesy
[Writer and artist, b. 1945, Shaker Heights, Ohio, lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.]
The pictures you’re about to see are of people who were actually once alive.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
Time runs and flows and only our death succeeds in catching up with it. Photography is a blade which, in eternity, impales the dazzling moment.
Allen Ginsberg
[Poet and writer, b. 1926, Newark, New Jersey, d. 1997, New York.]
We are all exposed to the flash bulb of death.
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...
