Alfred Eisenstaedt
[Photographer, b. 1898, Dirschau, West Prussia (now Tczew, Poland), d. 1995, New York.]
I will be remembered when I’m in heaven. People won’t remember my name, but they will know the photographer who did that picture of that nurse being kissed by the sailor at the end of World War II. Everybody remembers that.
Idris Khan
[Artist, b. 1978, Birmingham, England, lives in London.]
The photograph is a tool used to take you back to a certain point in one’s life, to remember a face or a place you once stood. I feel there is always something quite melancholic about a photograph.
Leni Riefenstahl
[Filmmaker and photographer, b. 1902, Berlin, Germany, d. 2003, Poecking, Germany.]
In 1934 people were crazy and there was great enthusiasm for Hitler. We had to try and find that with our camera.
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
[Writer, b. 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India, d. 1950, London.]
It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Oglivy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence... Comrade Oglivy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
Martha Rosler
[Artist, b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
Are we asserting the easy dominion of our civilization over all times and all places, as signs that we casually absorb as a form of loot?
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Though photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, free-standing particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
One might say that our most profound moments have been furnished, like some cigarette packages, with a little image, a photograph of ourselves. And that “whole life” which, as we often hear, passes before the dying or people in danger of dying, is composed precisely of those tiny images.
Milan Kundera
[Writer, b. 1929, Brno, Bohemia (now Czechoslovakia), lives in Paris.]
All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications.
