Peter Wollen
[Writer, theorist, filmmaker, b. 1938, London, lives in Los Angeles.]
The aesthetic discussion of photography is dominated by the concept of time. Photographs appear as devices stopping time and preserving fragments of the past, like flies in amber.
Brigitte Bardot
[Actress, b. 1934, Paris, lives in Saint Tropez, France.]
A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event. During the work, you have to be sure that you haven’t left any holes, that you've captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.
Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
I like to think that the universe I have liked will continue on a little bit longer and then will dissolve slowly, gently after I die. Fading in and out, like in the cinema, where we are accustomed to a fade-out at the end. I accept a fade-out. But what I cannot conceive of is a “click” at the end. In the case of those I have liked who have passed away, we continue to read their books, we continue to look at their drawings, their photos. It seems to me that in this way they continue to walk a bit of the way with us. And it is perhaps for this reason that I have photographed the old Paris that I liked so much when I was twenty or thirty years old.
Annette Kuhn
[Writer and theorist, lives in Lancaster, England.]
Memories evoked by a photograph do not simply spring out of the image itself, but are generated in an intertext of discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image, and between all these and cultural contexts, historical moments. In all this, the image figures largely as a trace, a clue: necessary, but not sufficient, to the activity of meaning-making; always signaling somewhere else.
Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
A memory from my youth comes back to me. You go into the woods on a bike, with a girl. There is the smell of heather, you can hear the wind in the fir trees, you don't dare tell her about your love, but you feel happy, as if you were floating above the ground. Then you look at the clouds beyond the trees and they are fleeting. And you know that within an hour you’ll have to go home, that tomorrow will be a working day. You wish you could stop that moment forever, but you can’t, it is bound to end. So you take a photo, as if to challenge time.
Allan deSouza
[Artist and writer, b. 1958, Nairobi, Kenya, lives in Los Angeles.]
Photography is now so vital to memory, as a safeguard that the past will not be erased. With the Jewish Holocaust, for example, photographs have become so central to the process of remembering—not necessarily private, but certainly collective, and ironically, we often rely, as with the Khmer Rouge, on the photographs taken by the murderers.
Shimon Attie
[Photographer, b. 1957, Los Angeles, lives in New York.]
I use contemporary media to reanimate sites and places with images of their own lost histories.
