John Divola
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
To photograph is often compared to an act of redemption—to select from an infinite number of choices that which is to be remembered.
bell hooks
[Educator and writer, b. 1952, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, lives in New York.]
For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
What served in the place of the photograph, before the camera’s invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory.
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
Olivia Parker
[Photographer, b. 1941, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Manchester, Massachusetts.]
Do photographs interfere with memory? Do we count on the image on the paper to be memory and leave the shifting shimmering vision in our minds behind?
John Baldessari
[Artist, b. 1931, National City, California, lives in Venice, California.]
I want to produce images that startle one into recollection.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.
I don’t have a memory of [my father]; I have a memory of a photograph.
