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.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo
[Photographer, b. 1902, Mexico City, d. 2002, Mexico City.]
I think that light and shadow have exactly the same duality that exists between life and death.
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.
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...
Christian Boltanski
[Artist, b. 1944, Paris, lives in Paris.]
We all die twice—once when we actually die and once when no one on earth recognizes our photograph.
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.
Dennis Stock
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 2010, Sarasota, Florida.]
The similarity between Van Gogh, Haiku poetry, and good photography is the concern for mortality. That things are very fleeting, that there are people who are more sensitive to death than others. The threat of time is of great concern to them. And the camera is a very appropriate instrument for many.
