Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
[My] photos are often out of focus, rough, streaky, warped, etc. But if you think about it, a normal human being will in one day perceive an infinite number of images, and some of them are focused upon, others are barely seen out of the corner of one’s eye.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying the truth.
Guy Debord
[Writer and theorist, b. 1931, Paris, d. 1994, Champot, Upper Loire, France.]
The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
I always fought hard against packaging a story so that all things seem to come to and end at the end of the story. I always wanted to leave it so that there is a tomorrow.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
Journalists should be by their very nature anarchists, people who want to point out things that are not generally approved of. It’s by criticizing that society that humanity has made progress.
Bill McKibben
[Writer, b. 1960, Palo Alto, California, lives near Lake Chanokaub, New York.]
... the constant flow of images undercuts the sense that there’s actually something wrong with the world. How can there really be a shortage of whooping cranes when you’ve seen a thousand images of them—seen ten times more images than there are actually whooping cranes left in the wild?
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
I have found tangible evidence that within this life’s sweet tedium reside certain truths: that nothing attains maximum beauty until touched with decay, that the vulgar and miraculous can be one.
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.
