Italo Calvino
[Writer, b. 1923, Santiago de la Vegas, Cuba, d. 1985, Siena, Italy.]
Perhaps true, total photography, he thought, is a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations.
Bill Eppridge
[Photographer, b. 1938, Buenos Aires, d. 2013, Danbury, Connecticut.]
You are not just a photojournalist, you’re a historian.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
Photography in our time leaves us with a grave responsibility. While we are playing in our studios with broken flowerpots, oranges, nude studies and still lifes, one day we know that we will be brought to account: life is passing before our eyes without our ever having seen a thing.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Evans was, and is, interested in what any present time will look like as the past.
(An unpublished note characterizing his own work)
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.
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
... looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of “just looking”: vision is structured in such a way that the look always-already includes a history of the subject.
Eleanor Antin
[Artist, b. 1935, New York, lives in San Diego, California.]
I adore [photography’s] uneasy mix of fact and fiction—its dubious claim to truth—its status as history.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
Photography has always been a prosthesis for the human eye, in fact for man as a whole, his consciousness, his life. After all, at fifty, who can still remember exactly what he looked like at sixteen, what furniture used to be in the living room, what the street he lived on looked like. In this case, a prosthesis for memory. It can even provide you with an image of the great-grandfather you only know about from hearsay.
