Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
![](/images/rdquo.gif)
Newer technology provides a nonstop feed: as many images of disaster and atrocity as we can make time to look at.
![](/images/rdquo.gif)
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.
![](/images/rdquo.gif)
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
Images have become our true sex objects. It is this promiscuity and the ubiquity of images, this viral contamination of images which are the fatal characteristics of our culture.
![](/images/rdquo.gif)
Andy Warhol
[Artist, b. 1928, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, d. 1987, New York.]
I wish I hadn’t made so many images.
![](/images/rdquo.gif)
Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]
Perhaps the first photograph ever taken, Niépce’s view of the rooftops over Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, was a truly pure photograph. The second one he took, he was already comparing nature to the first photograph he had taken.
![](/images/rdquo.gif)
Lucy Lippard
[Critic and writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.]
There is indeed something omnivorous about the act of photography. It offers a way of responding to everything about everything.
![](/images/rdquo.gif)
Umberto Eco
[Writer, semiotician, and philosopher, b. 1932, Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy, d. 2016, Milan.]
You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it’s a memory that you’ve given me. I’ll remember the photo from now on, but not them.
![](/images/rdquo.gif)