"Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each merges from their own sphere and mixes together. This is precisely what contract and exchange are." -Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 1923

"The truth of any event is predicated on the addition...of that invisible part of every fact, and it is this part, therefore, which the historian has to add. Regarded in this way, he does become active, even creative – not by bringing forth what does not have existence, but in giving shape by his own powers to that which by mere intuition he could not have perceived as it really was. Differently from the poet, but in a way similar to him, he must work the collected fragments into a whole." -Wilhelm von Humboldt, On the Historian's Task, 1821

"...Western notions of occularcentrism and the primacy of the visual in thinking about photographs has elided the sensory and emotional impact of photographs as things that matter. I use the world 'matter' intentionally for it suggests the emotional and the sensory ...As such, it might be said to explore photography beyond the visual: photography whose social meanings are not necessarily dictated exclusively by the visual but also by their perception as objects through which the visual is performed and understood."-Elizabeth Edwards, Photographs and the Sound of History, 2006.

"In fact matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing and that is all we want of it... Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable." -Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1859