leituras

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's rentless melt.

Though an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth photographing, it is still ideology (in the broadest sense) that determines what constitutes an event. There can be no evidence, photographic ore otherwise, of an event until the event itself has been named and characterized. And it is never photographic evidence which can construct - more properly, identify - events; the contribution of photography always follows the naming of the event. What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness. Without a politics, photographs of the slaughter-bench of history will most likely be experienced as, simply, unreal or as a demoralizing emotional blow.

Quotations

Your photography is a record of your living for anyone who really sees. You may see and bee affected by other people's ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself from them. That is what Nietzsche meant when he said, "I have just read Shopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him." He knew how insidious other people's ways could be, particularly those wich have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own vision. - Paul Strand

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug a camera. - Lewis Hine

Susan Sontag, On Photography