Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
The ability of photographs to conjure deep emotion is one of their great strengths. But this power—precisely because it is divorced from narrative, political context, and analysis—is equally a danger. Ironically, the more searing an image… the more misleading it can be.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.
E. L. Doctorow
[Writer, b. 1931, New York, lives in New York.]
Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual’s calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality.
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
At certain moments of intense personal grief, capturing images was for me the only way to comprehend later what was happening.
Ruth Orkin
[Photographer, b. 1921, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1985, New York.]
My mother said that when I was young I was constantly saying, “Look at this—Look at that.” I think that taking pictures must be my way of asking people to “Look at this—Look at that.” If my photographs make the viewer feel what I did when I first took them—“Isn’t this funny... terrible... moving... beautiful?”—then I’ve accomplished my purpose.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
I attempt to channel my anger into the tip of my forefinger as I press the shutter.
Burke Uzzle
[Photographer, b. 1938, Raleigh, North Carolina, lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.]
A photographer’s best pictures are from deep inside him, and also some of the worst. Some photographers enjoy distinguished careers without ever taking personal photographs. Others, audaciously and arrogantly and courageously discharge their most private feelings through photography. Trouble is, sometimes it all adds up to baloney.
Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
There are two forces operating in my work: pleasure and terror.
