Vilém Flusser
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1920, Prague, Czechoslovakia, d. 1991, Prague.]
...there is no everyday activity which does not aspire to be photographed, filmed or videotaped. For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
It’s nice how film survives. It’s not the way photographs are. It’s still alive. A photograph is just a memory.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
The kind of photography I did is gone. It’s old. There’s no point in it anymore for me, and I get no satisfaction from trying to do it. There are too many pictures now. It’s overwhelming. A flood of images that passes by, and says, “Why should we remember anything?” There is too much to remember now, too much to take in.
Vilém Flusser
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1920, Prague, Czechoslovakia, d. 1991, Prague.]
[Photographic images] absorb the whole of history and form a collective memory going endlessly round in circles.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory... but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.
Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
The image wanders ghostlike through the present. Ghostly apparitions occur only in places where a terrible deed has been committed.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
When I remember my childhood, I remember pictures of my childhood; I don’t remember actual moments. Photographs are really subversive in that way. If those are the only memories we have, and we know that photography lies—or at least is very limited in its presentation of information—then what does that make your childhood? One big lie?
