Christian Boltanski
[Artist, b. 1944, Paris, lives in Paris.]
We all die twice—once when we actually die and once when no one on earth recognizes our photograph.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
Sometimes it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It’s as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
All photographs are
memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo
[Photographer, b. 1902, Mexico City, d. 2002, Mexico City.]
I think that light and shadow have exactly the same duality that exists between life and death.
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
Making a definitive declaration of intent or meaning kills the photograph.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
When one has a picture taken, the photographer says “Perfect!” Just as you are! That is death.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
[Anthropologist, b. 1908, Brussels, Belgium, d. 2009, Paris.]
How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time…
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
A negative doesn’t mean anything for a photographer of my type. It’s the printing by its creator alone that matters.
(On his stipulation that none of his photographs be printed posthumously)
