Jim Goldberg
[Photographer, b. 1953, New Haven, Connecticut, lives in San Francisco.]
Before I even took pictures I knew that I wanted to have them as hard copy memories.
Vicki Goldberg
[Critic and writer, St. Louis, Missouri, lives in New York.]
When photography was invented, people had to make room in their minds for the idea that the dead would always be visible.
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.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.
Simon Norfolk
[Photographer, b. 1963, Lagos, Nigeria, lives in Brighton, England.]
[My] pictures are about memory and forgetfulness. The evidence is dissolving. Bones crumble; human ash returns to soil; teeth, sandals, hair, bullets, axes disperse into atoms and molecules. Footprints in the snow will be erased by the next storm. The evidence of evil, like the evidence of good, obeys the universal laws of entropy. Heat cools, matter disintegrates, memories fade. If we let them.
Graham Greene
[Writer, b. 1904, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England, d. 1991, Vevey, Switzerland.]
The less you know the better. You have forgotten memories. What you forget becomes the compost of the imagination. Renounce photography.
Roman Vishniac
[Photographer, b. 1897, Pavlovsk, Russia, d. 1990, New York.]
I was living in Germany in the thirties, and I knew that Hitler had made it his mission to exterminate all Jews, especially the children and the women who could bear children in the future. I was unable to save my people, only their memory.
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
Most of what I want simply slips away like water flowing through a net, and always what remains are only vague, elusive fragments of images… that sink into countless strata in my mind.
