"Every photograph of others bears the traces of the meeting between the photographed persons and the photographer, neither of whom can, on their own, determine how this meeting will be inscribed in the resulting image. The photograph exceeds any presumption of ownership or monopoly and any attempt at being exhaustive. Even when it seems possible to name correctly in the form of a statement what it shows –‘This is X’ –it will always turn out that something else can be read in it, some other event can be reconstructed from it, some other player’s presence can be discerned through it, constructing the social relations that allowed its production." -Ariela Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 2008

“Since the photographer's picture was not conceived but selected, his subject was never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated what he thought most important, but the subject he had shot was something else; it had extended in four directions. …The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge—the line that separates in from out—and on the shapes that are created by it.” -John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, 1966

"A historical ethnography, then, must begin by constructing its own archive. It cannot content itself with established canons of documentary evidence, because these are themselves part of the culture of global modernism-- as much the subject as the means of inquiry. As anthropologists, therefore, we must work both in and outside the official record, both with and beyond the guardians of memory in the societies we study." Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, 1992