Why did we write it down?  In order to remember of course, but exactly what was it we wanted to remember?  How much of it actually happened? Did any of it?... This is how it felt to us. How it felt to us: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook…  See enough and write it down…  It all comes back.

Excerpt from Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook, 1966.

Like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by many people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power. Memorializing the achievements of individuals considered as members of families… Through photographs each family constructs a portrait chronicle of itself—a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.

… It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.

Excerpt from Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.