Historical Images Quotes

I collect rare photographs... I have two... One of Houdini locking his keys in his car... the other is a rare picture of Norman Rockwell beating up a child.

I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.

We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

I think creating the clothes is about creating historical images - and that's about more than fashion. It is about the fashion, the photography, what you are doing in the moment. It's what we call in French rechercher, or the search for that thing. So even though fashion is not scientific, I think being a designer is somewhat like being a scientist.

I think a bigger difference with social media is going to be things like the impact Instagram will have for historians. For the longest time, we had no images of the past. And then when we had the advent of the camera, we had a record of the things people chose to photograph, which, for a while, were portraits of your family, a new building we built, or a really big horse. Well now we have images of everything. That will be the biggest difference I think - that we will have a visual record of this reality in a way that will be completely covered.

It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

I'd love to do historical pictures more, but I don't know if I can.

Rex is 60 years old with 13 million images and 10 million in archive. It's the first time we've had a historic archive to work with, which is super interesting.

Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history’s illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.

I was actually asked to do the Christmas design for the White House. I thought it would be interesting, given that it has such a rich history, to decorate around some real beautiful oversized images of the history of the White House and the history of the country.