Documenting the Past Quotes

I tend to believe that film can try to save what still can be saved, in terms of our histories, our memories. Because a lot of things are disappearing very quickly, things are changing. We are living in very quick times, and we have a new generation who basically know nothing about events 30 years ago.

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.

History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

I wanted to make pictures where you would not know who took them. I also bring the present into the past.

Not to be pompous about it - my thing in life is to write history and not to chat on TV 24 hours a day.

I want to write for history, not for the moment.

I like to try to capture places that a lot of people went to or have a deep emotional connection to. Malls, abandoned speedways, abandoned theme parks. To me, those are most interesting kinds of things to capture.

Among intellectual pursuits, one of the most useful is the recording of past events.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

The thing that I loved about 'Feud,' we froze a moment in time for these families that had never occurred before. That's magic.