Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
What photograph isn’t a still life?
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
Craig Owens
[Writer and critic, b. 1950, d. 1990.]
As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image.
Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
...the world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it.
Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there—even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.
Walt Whitman
[Writer and poet, b. 1819, South Huntington, Long Island, New York, d. 1892, Camden, New Jersey.]
An electric chain seems to vibrate, as it were, between our brain and him or her preserved there [in a Daguerreotype] so well by the limner’s cunning. Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality.
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
The crushing force of time is before my eyes, and I myself try to keep pressing the shutter release of the camera.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
