Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
...there is always a defeat of Time in [historical photographs]:
that is dead and
that is going to die. These two little girls looking at a primitive airplane above their village (they are dressed like my mother as a child, they are playing with hoops)—how alive they are! They have their whole lives before them; but also they are dead (today), they are then
already dead (yesterday).
Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
I never photograph anything I don’t believe in. If I love working with death, it’s because even in death I find this power of reality that no sculptor or painter could recreate, not even a Michelangelo or a Da Vinci.
Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
The camera itself, the photograph itself, calls up death.
Italo Calvino
[Writer, b. 1923, Santiago de la Vegas, Cuba, d. 1985, Siena, Italy.]
…the fixity of the image is death, hence our inner reluctance to be photographed, as well as our submission to it.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.
Joan Didion
[Writer, b. 1934, Sacramento, California, lives in New York.]
…if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table.
Bert Hardy
[Photographer, b. 1913, London, d. 1995, Oxted, England.]
Although I do not usually like taking pictures of corpses, I controlled my feelings of rage for long enough to take some; without such evidence, no one would believe that anything like this had ever happened.
(On photographing the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 19, 1945)
Werner Herzog
[Filmmaker, b. 1942, Sachrang, Germany, lives in Munich and Los Angeles.]
It’s like death staring at you when you look at a camera.
