Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]

 To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. 
 When I make a photograph, I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order—(unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder). 
 It is no longer a matter of expressing reality, but of expressing what one feels about reality. 
 We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. 
 There are two forces operating in my work: pleasure and terror. 
 The only nature I’m interested in is my own nature. 
 For some reason or other there was in me the desire to see the world clean and fresh and alive, as primitive things are clean and fresh and alive. The so-called documentary picture left me wanting something. 
 I care only for people—I’m interested only in human destiny. It just happens that I work symbolically—not directly with people as subjects. 
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