Peter Conrad
[Critic, b. 1948, Hobart, Tasmania, lives in Oxford, England.]
The camera is a killing chamber, which speeds up the time it claims to be conserving. Like coffins exhumed and prised open, the photographs put on show what we were and what we will be again.
Brian Duffy
[Photographer, b. 1933, London, d. 2010, London.]
Photography was dead by 1972. Everything had been resolved between 1839 and 1972. Every picture after ‘72, I have seen pre-‘72. Nothing new. But it took me some time to detect its death. The first person who twigged was Henri Cartier-Bresson. He just stopped—and started painting and drawing. God, he was useless.
Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
The average photography web site is like a small-scale cemetery, but twice as dead.
Allen Ginsberg
[Poet and writer, b. 1926, Newark, New Jersey, d. 1997, New York.]
The poignancy of the photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred.
Jean Cocteau
[Writer, poet, artist, and filmmaker, b. 1889, Maisons-Lafitte, France, d. 1963, Milly-la-Foret, France.]
The only way to kill death is through photography.
Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
When you hold on to something that moves, that is a kind of death. The camera, the photographic image have always called forth the idea of death. And I think about death when I photograph, as you can see in the pictures. That may be an oriental, Buddhist concept.
Sabrina Harman
[U.S. military guard at Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq, b. 1978, Lorton, Virginia, lives in Virginia.]
On June 23 I saw my first dead body I took pictures! The other day I heard my first grenade go off. Fun!
(To her father, June 23, 2003, written from Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq)
Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough.
