Geoffrey C. Ward Quotes

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

When I was really young, I wanted to be a history teacher because I was obsessed with the past.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.

Most of the photographs people take with their cameraphones are of little value in terms of documentary.

It takes only a few seconds to make history new again.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

I've always been a bit of a documentarian.

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

We know the past and its great events, the present in its multitudinous complications, chiefly through faith in the testimony of others.

Since 1970, I've been using text and ephemera as well as photographs in order to tell stories of one kind or another. There's a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness. The photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them.

We can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future.

Writing history is writing the soul of the past...

I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.

I've always thought photography is not so much of an art form but a way of communicating and passing on information.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

Historia (Inquiry); so that the actions of of people will not fade with time.

One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, - to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to collect sagas and heap cairns. This instinct as to the enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization.

History can be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever.

Old images and films are my main source of inspiration.

Long before we created libraries, or even books, poetry was the way we humans remembered who we were, a primary means of documenting and contemplating our lives.

The suffragettes were quite strategic about documenting their events, and there were some good photos. And we developed a roll of film that had never been developed before!

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.