Martine Franck
[Photographer, b. 1938, Antwerp, Belgium, d. 2012, Paris.]
My grandfather killed himself falling off the dike in Ostend while photographing my two cousins. This can happen so easily when looking through a lens: for a split second nothing else exists outside the frame.
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
... photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to the thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables. The photograph is thus generically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches.
Albert Einstein
[Scientist, b. 1879, Ulm, Württemberg, Germany, d. 1955, Princeton, New Jersey.]
A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
[Photographer, b. 1925, Normal, Illinois, d. 1972, Lexington, Kentucky.]
I like the obvious statement, although some people might wish to think they aren’t there, that they will go away with time.
Michael Light
[Photographer, b. 1963, Florida, lives in San Francisco.]
Even in this age of digital manipulation, photographs continue to hold a huge degree of power and meaning. They’re beautiful and sad and complicated because every stoppage of time refers to the motion of time.
Irving Penn
[Photographer, b. 1917, Plainfield, New Jersey, d. 2009, New York.]
The printed page seems to have come to something of a dead end for all of us.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The failure of photography seems to me to be flagrant in this connection: to reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing; ... [it] only make[s] the gestures of man look eternal the better to defuse them.
Andres Serrano
[Artist, b. 1950, New York, lives in New York.]
I don’t really think I am interested in the macabre, but I am curious about death. That’s normal... The only certainty in life is that we’re all going to die. It would be unnatural not to think about death once in a while.
