Visual Legacy Quotes

The only way to kill death is through photography.

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

I wanted to be videotaped.

Once you get a trick on film, it's there forever.

Albert Einstein had learned to look into cameras as if he were meeting the eyes of the future beholders of his image.

I have lived in a flurry of images, but I will go out in a freeze frame.

My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished.

I want to be remembered much more by a total vision than a few perfect single 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.

I always had the feeling, even when I started, that my photography was meant to be archival in nature. Sort of like wine, I guess - they get better with age.

I hope films will be somehow preserved and seen by as many people as possible in the future. There are endless treasures for audiences to discover, if only we can keep them from disappearing.

The class that I teach is called "The Life of a Photograph." It takes up the question, of the billion photographs that were taken today, how many will have a life, and why? So the new reality has made the question more pertinent, not less pertinent.