I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.
Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.
There's a lot in my closet. I've been collecting things since I was five. I'm definitely a pack rat. I'm not a hoarder, but I'm definitely a pack rat. I will keep anything if I have a memory in it or a good moment.
And I always keep cards people send me. I have a whole wall covered with them.
Everything rational and sensible abandons me when I try to throw out photographs. Time and time again, I hold one over a wastebasket, and then find it impossible to release my fingers and let the picture drop and disappear.
Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.
I've been going through photos of my mother, looking back on her life and trying to put it into context. Very few people age gracefully enough to be photographed through their aging.
I clean out my house weekly. I just keep a lot of silly little things that are meaningful to me.
Pretty mundane closet, but a lot of ties. And I tend not to throw anything out, so I have a lot of clothes from all times from my life. I can be a little sentimental with things like that.
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
The only way to kill death is through photography.
My son and daughter lost their father quite young, so we keep him present with us. It's just a daily practice.
Way back in my mid-20s, I started making notes. I would just jot things down: lists of street names, songs, peculiar turns of speech, jokes, whatever.
Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.
My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.
Whenever something happens that makes me laugh or if I remember something in the middle of the night that I want to share, I jot the experience down.
Little remnants from everywhere I've been are scattered around my home. I collect rocks in a weird way, with stones from around the world as mementos. I've also got three haranas, which are little guitars.
My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn't live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we'd never forget.
In the jungle, every day is like the other. So you need to have a special discipline to make things different and to keep in your memory the dates and the days. And I think that's something that's very important when you are held hostage.
Some travelers collect souvenirs, postcards, or bumper stickers; I bring home a pencil from the various places I visit.
I have thousands of tapes, and photos and fliers, letters, posters, artwork - basically everything that ever happened, I kept. I'm not a hoarder, though. I'm sort of a librarian.
My great-grandmother, who was known as Nana, passed away before I was born, but she and my mother were very, very close. For as long as I can remember, we made Nana's waffles in my house. It was a weekend tradition.
Photography has definitely been my favorite way to remember things. At least for me that’s how my brain processes things, of memories or moments.
I never go to funerals. To me a person is dead when he breathes for the last time. After that, your memories should be personal.
I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
