A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a mome…

- Siegfried Kracauer

There is no one who has no leisure time at all. The office is not a permanent sanctuary, and Sundays are an institution. Thus, in principle, during t…

- Siegfried Kracauer

The flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the i…

- Siegfried Kracauer

The image wanders ghostlike through the present. Ghostly apparitions occur only in places where a terrible deed has been committed.

- Siegfried Kracauer

...the world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of dea…

- Siegfried Kracauer

The photograph annihilates the person.

- Siegfried Kracauer

Guided by film...we approach, if at all, ideas no longer on highways leading through the void but on paths that wind through the thicket of things.

- Siegfried Kracauer