W. G. Sebald Quotes

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

I take a few pictures a week, but the best part is waiting for my film to be developed. The suspense is exciting, and the reward is great.

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

The digital camera is a great invention because it allows us to reminisce. Instantly.

I knew from the first moment I picked up a camera, on my first school assignment, what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was going to find a way to travel the world and tell the stories of the people I met through photographs.

I still love to look at photographs but I couldn't do it myself anymore.

I was always in front of the camera. My mom was really passionate about photography - I have pictures of my whole life. I've always just been in front of my mom's camera, and it's always comfortable to me.

I know everything should be photographed. It helps me make sense of my existence.

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 think you save things from your past that you don't quite understand, and you put them in a box, and you save them for later until you can unwrap them and try to understand what they meant.

There's a lot of different things that make me want to take photos. A lot of it is, for a long time I've been obsessed with the thought of time travel with my camera.

I was probably five when I first picked up a camera. My mom had an Olympus OM-10 that she carried around to document our family photos. And I just always loved it.

Any child who has lost a parent probably knows every single photograph in existence of that parent.

I always liked taking photographs.

Every photo, every 'ONCE' in time is also the beginning of a story starting 'once upon a time...' Every photo is the first frame of a movie.

Photography is a form of time travel.

Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the future

I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.

We grew up with a camera in front of us.

I wish my family had taken more pictures when I was growing up. Instead of always having to draw everything.

Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you.

Nobody takes a picture of something they want to forget.

I open journal, I look at the picture and I remember where I was. And I remember the time of day, the temperature of the air, what music was playing, or who was talking to me, or who was looking over my shoulder and what conversations we had and the smells of the earth and the time of year it was. It's all there for me in a way that we don't get looking at a snapshot. Most of us look back at a snapshot from ten years ago and say, where was that? We don't even remember where we were.

One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir... as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were.

The camera is the eye of history.