Jacques Derrida
[Philosopher and writer, b. 1930, El Biar, Algeria (then French Algeria), d. 2004, Paris.]

 I absolutely forbade all public photographs of myself. I like photography, I don’t have anything against it, but... 
 During the fifteen or twenty years in which I tried—it was not always easy with publishers, newspapers, etc.—to forbid photographs, it was not at all in order to mark a sort of blank, absence, or disappearance of the image; it was because the code that dominates at once the production of these images, the framing they are made to undergo, the social implications (showing the writer’s head framed in front his bookshelves, the whole scenario) seemed to me to be, first of all, terribly boring, but also contrary to what I am trying to write and to work on.