Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.
Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I don’t care so much anymore about “good photography,” I am gathering evidence for history.
Milan Kundera
[Writer, b. 1929, Brno, Bohemia (now Czechoslovakia), lives in Paris.]
The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
History breaks down into images, not into stories.
Matthew Brady
[Photographer, b. 1823, Warren County, New York, d. 1896, New York.]
The camera is the eye of history.
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.
Umberto Eco
[Writer, semiotician, and philosopher, b. 1932, Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy, d. 2016, Milan.]
The vicissitudes of our century have been summed up in a few exemplary photographs that have proved epoch-making: the unruly crowd pouring into the square during the “ten days that shook the world;” Robert Capa’s dying
miliciano; the marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima; the Vietnamese prisoner being executed with a shot in the temple; Che Guevara’s tortured body on a plank in a barracks. Each of these images has become a myth and has condensed numerous speeches. It has surpassed the individual circumstance that produced it; it no longer speaks of that single character or of those characters, but expresses concepts.
Chris Killip
[Photographer, b. 1946, Douglas, Isle of Man, United Kingdom, lives in Boston.]
The moment you make a photograph you consign whatever you photograph to the past as that specific moment no longer exists, it is history. The photography that I practice takes place in a specific time and place, depicting real moments in people’s lives. In some ways I think of myself as a historian, but not of the word. History is most often written from a distance, and rarely from the viewpoint of those who endured it.
