Allen Ginsberg
[Poet and writer, b. 1926, Newark, New Jersey, d. 1997, New York.]
The poignancy of the photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
Sometimes it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It’s as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed.
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.
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.
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.
Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
The photograph annihilates the person.
Bert Hardy
[Photographer, b. 1913, London, d. 1995, Oxted, England.]
Although I do not usually like taking pictures of corpses, I controlled my feelings of rage for long enough to take some; without such evidence, no one would believe that anything like this had ever happened.
(On photographing the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 19, 1945)
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.
