Jack Kerouac (Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac)
[Writer, b. 1922, Lowell, Massachusetts, d. 1969, St. Petersburg, Florida.]
...[the photographer] can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. His work, print after print of it, seems to call to be shown before the decay which it portrays flattens all... Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse.
Peter Wollen
[Writer, theorist, filmmaker, b. 1938, London, lives in Los Angeles.]
Photography is motionless and frozen, it has the cryogenic power to preserve objects through time without decay.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
Sometimes the pictures disappear and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t tell the person, “Oh, please smile again. Do that gesture again.” Life is once, forever.
Susan Meiselas
[Photographer, b. 1948, Baltimore, Maryland, lives in New York.]
You look at photographs that freeze time, but then time moves.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.
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).
Frank Horvat
[Photographer, b. 1928, Abbazia, Italy, now Opatija, Croatia, lives in Paris.]
...photography is made essentially of time. I often think that what we show is a point in time, more than a window onto space.
Lisette Model
[Photographer, b. 1906, Vienna, Austria, d. 1983, New York.]
Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.
