Christian Metz
[Writer and film theorist, b. 1931, Béziers, France, lives in France.]
Photography is the mirror, more faithful than any actual mirror, in which we witness at every age, our own aging. The actual mirror accompanies us through time, thoughtfully and treacherously; it changes with us, so that we appear not to change.
Harold Pinter
[Playwright, b. 1930, London, d. 2008, London.]
I might even show you my photograph album. You might even see a face in it which might remind you of your own, of what you once were. You might see faces of others, in shadow, or cheeks of others turning, or jaws, or backs of necks, or eyes, dark under hats, which might remind you of others, whom you once knew, whom you thought long dead, but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance.
Sam Abell
[Photographer, b. 1945, Sylvania, Ohio, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.]
Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment—this very moment—to stay.
Catherine Opie
[Photographer, b. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio, lives in Los Angeles.]
So much of my obsession with being a documentarian comes from this deep-seated sense of the loss of time, and of how things shift so quickly.
Pierre MacOrlan
[Writer, b. 1882, Péronne, France, d. 1970, Saint-Cyr-on-Morin, France.]
The greatest field of photography, for the literary interpretation of life, consists, to my mind, in its latent power to create, as it were, death for a single second. Any thing or person is, at will, made to die for a moment of time so immeasurably small that the return to life is effected without consciousness of the great adventure.
(1928)
Boris Yaro
[Photographer, b. 1938, lives in Northridge, California.]
Let go, lady. Godammit, this is history!
(Trying to get a clear shot of the dying Robert Kennedy.)
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
It is often said that it was the painters who invented Photography (by bequeathing it their framing, the Albertian perspective, and the optic of the
camera obscura). I say: no, it was the chemists. For the
noeme “That-has-been” was possible only on the day when a scientific circumstance (the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light) made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
In Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric... if the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as
corpse: it is the living image of the dead.
