David Wojnarowicz
[Artist and activist, b. 1954, Redbank, New Jersey, d. 1990, New York.]

 History is made and preserved by and for particular classes of people. A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history. 

Vilém Flusser
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1920, Prague, Czechoslovakia, d. 1991, Prague.]

 [Photographic images] absorb the whole of history and form a collective memory going endlessly round in circles. 

Josef Koudelka
[Photographer, b. 1938, Biskovice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, lives in Paris.]

 The changes taking place in this part of Europe are enormous and very rapid. One world is disappearing. I am trying to photograph what’s left. I have always been drawn to what is ending, what will soon no longer exist. 

W.G Sebald
[Writer, b. 1944, Bavaria, Germany, d. 2001, East Anglia, England.]

 One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs]—it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir... as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were. 

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. 

David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]

 One terrible truth about photographs is that they can only ever show us what happened, never what is happening or will happen. They are always about something that is gone, and so are in league with death. 

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. 

Adrienne Rich
[Feminist and writer, b. 1929, Baltimore, Maryland, d. 2012, Santa Cruz, California.]

 Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult to come by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language, this will become not merely unspoken, but unspeakable. 
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