Walt Whitman
[Writer and poet, b. 1819, South Huntington, Long Island, New York, d. 1892, Camden, New Jersey.]
[Mathew Brady and I] had many a talk together: the point was, how much better it would often be, rather than having a lot of contradictory records by witnesses or historians—say of Caesar, Socrates, Epictetus, others—if we could have three or four or half a dozen portraits—very accurate—of the men: that would be history—the best history—a history from which there could be no appeal.
(1889) 
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
If photographs are our connection to the past, it’s a very peculiar, fragile, sentimental connection. You take a photograph before you destroy something. The photograph is its posthumous existence.
Catherine Opie
[Photographer, b. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio, lives in Los Angeles.]
I do photograph things for people to look at 100 years from now. But we’re such a mediated society that things become historical the next day.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
When Bill Gates started Corbis we were told that he needed images to fill those “digital picture frames” in his home, and many found this plausible. But now it’s pretty clear that he’s set out to control the visual history of the twentieth century.
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.)
Peter Bunnell
[Writer and photo historian, b. 1937, Poughkeepsie, New York, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
Each image suggests an inner reality, a kind of scar of the past, a reflection of an act or an event once lived.
David Burnett
[Photojournalist, b. 1946, Salt Lake City, Utah, lives in Arlington, Virginia.]
I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.
Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]
The sights I have just seen [at Buchenwald] are so unbelievable that I don’t think I’ll believe them myself until I’ve seen the photographs...
