Enjoy every minute you have with those you love, my dear, for no one can take joy that is past away from you. It will be there in your heart to live on when the dark days come.
When I die and my memories die with me, all that will remain will be thousands of yellowing photographs and 35mm negatives in my filing cabinets.
Photography is a form of time travel.
Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting
I sometimes feel fiction is the ideal preservation for real memories. Fiction is such a good place to keep things.
I was really inspired by keeping alive these things of my childhood.
To collect photographs is to collect the world.
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
I came from a family where, you know, we sat down at the table every night, and you better have a story to tell. My father never wrote his stories down. And you know, I learned that they went farther if you wrote them down.
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.
I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present. I want to gather them, like somebody's grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.
I should like to freeze in time all those I do love, keep them somehow safe from the ravages of the passing years..."Rather like flowers pressed between the pages of a book!
If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.
To photograph is to confer importance.
Do I need fifty finger-painted pictures by my toddler, or is one enough to capture this time of life? Mementos work best when they're carefully chosen - and when they don't take up much room!
I think that's the thing that memoir can do more than anything it does; it testifies and bears witness to the existence of people whose lives, pleasures and virtues would never have been testified to without my having done it. That makes me really glad.
To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera is the least a great artist can do.
When a moment in front of me appears to be particularly special, whether it be by beauty or experience, I capture it. I usually find a reason to justify taking that photo - symmetry, or color, or contrast - and it's my hope that my photography sheds light onto what I see and do on a daily basis.
The intent to preserve and capture something is very different from the urge to share, but they had become intertwined.
If there was no other motive in view [except] to have the privilege of reading over our journals and for our children to read, it would pay for the time spent in writing it.
I have a kid so I like to take pictures.
Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves. . . . New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.
O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.
