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.

We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate… Perhaps Generation Y (and Z) have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0…

But what if some of the software currently shaping our generation is unworthy of us? What if we are more interesting than it allows us to be? …To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photographs.

Excerpt from Zadie Smith, Generation Why?, 2010.