2. Quotes to fuel my imagination

A Short History of Photography, Benjamin, W. 1931.

• p.203 "the phenomenon of photography was still a great secret experience,".
• p.204 "all possibilities of this portrait art rested upon the fact that the connection between actuality and photo had not yet been entered upon."
• p.204 "The synthesis of expression which was achieved through the long immobility of the model, Orlik says of the early photographs, is the chief reason besides their simplicity why these photographs, like well drawn or painted likenesses, exercise a more penetrating, longer-lasting effect on the observer than photographs taken more recently. The procedure itself caused the models to live, not out of the instant, but into it; during the long exposure they grew, as it were, into the image."
• p.209 "What is aura? A strange web of time and space: the unique appearance of a distance, however close at hand. On a summer noon, resting, to follow the line of a mountain range on the horizon or a twig which throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or hour begins to be a part of its appearance - that is the breathe the aura of those mountains, that twig. [...] Day by day the need becomes greater to take possession of the object [...]".
• p.210 "They are not lonely but voiceless; the city in these pictures is swept clean like a house which has not yet found its new tenant. These are the sort of effects with which Surrealist photography established a healthy alienation between environment and man [...]. On the other hand, the renunciation of the human image is the most difficult of all things for photography."

The Ontology of the Photographic Image, Bazin, A. 1960. 

• p.4 "Thus, by providing a defence against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological need in man, for death is but the victory of time. To preserve, artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life." The photograph naturally fights time, the photography can physically age and deteriorate but still holds that one moment in time at your fingertips. The Egyptians tried to fight against time by preserving their bodies.
• p.7 "[...] photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism."
• p.7 "Again, the essential factor in the transition from the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process (photography will long remain the inferior of painting in the reproduction of colour); rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying out appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays no part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved but in the way of achieving it."