Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
When you hold on to something that moves, that is a kind of death. The camera, the photographic image have always called forth the idea of death. And I think about death when I photograph, as you can see in the pictures. That may be an oriental, Buddhist concept.
Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
The average photography web site is like a small-scale cemetery, but twice as 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)
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 photograph annihilates the person.
Werner Herzog
[Filmmaker, b. 1942, Sachrang, Germany, lives in Munich and Los Angeles.]
It’s like death staring at you when you look at a camera.
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.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.
