Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I don’t care so much anymore about “good photography,” I am gathering evidence for history.
Hugh Hefner
[Publisher and playboy, b. 1926, Chicago, d. 2017, Los Angeles.]
... Orwellian Newspeak was really all about the notion that you could change the labels and the language of things and you would change the perception. And we have seen that certainly in terms of sex in really dramatic form in the last twenty years in which sexual images that were perceived in the past as simply pin-up pictures were then perceived and called exploitation and then eventually called pornography, and they are the same innocent pin-up pictures.
Robert Coles
[Writer and psychiatrist, b. 1929, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Concord, Massachusetts.]
Doing documentary work is a journey, and is a little more, too, a passage across boundaries (disciplines, occupational constraints, definitions, conventions all too influentially closed for traffic), a passage that can become a quest, even a pilgrimage, a movement toward the sacred truth enshrined not only on tablets of stone, but in the living hearts of those others whom we can hear, see, and get to understand. Thereby we hope to be confirmed in our own humanity—the creature on this earth whose very nature it is to make just that kind of connection with others during the brief stay we are permitted here.
William James
[Writer, philosopher, and psychologist, b. 1842, New York, d. 1910, Chocoura, New Hampshire.]
Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
If no theoretical distinction has been made between the photograph as scientific evidence and the photograph as a means of communication, this has been not so much an oversight as a proposal.
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.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
I think what I am doing is valid and worth doing, and I use the word transcendent. That’s very pretentious, but if I’m satisfied that something transcendent shows in a photograph I’ve done, that’s it. It’s there, I’ve done it. Without being able to explain, I know it absolutely, that it happens sometimes, and I know by the way I feel in the action that it goes like magic—this is it. It’s as though there’s a wonderful secret in a certain place and I can capture it. Only I can do it at this moment, only this moment and only me. That’s a hell of a thing to believe, but I believe it or I couldn’t act.
Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
The main thing that a work of art has to give you is order. It takes all this mess of ours, which is so wonderful and so disturbing, and puts it together for us so that we can contemplate it. It removes you from life so that you can live your life.
