Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
There are several tenets that go with this craft of ours. One of them is that the real gift and value in a picture is really not a thought; it is a sensation based on feeling.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Pictures of pain are not necessarily painful pictures, and this is why our response to them fluctuates between shame and delight, horror and pleasure.
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.
André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
You don’t see the things you photograph, you feel them.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
I always say that I don’t want to be sentimental, that the photographs shouldn’t be sentimental, and yet, I am conscious of my sentimentality.
Bert Hardy
[Photographer, b. 1913, London, d. 1995, Oxted, England.]
Although I do not usually like taking pictures of corpses, I controlled my feelings of rage for long enough to take some; without such evidence, no one would believe that anything like this had ever happened.
(On photographing the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 19, 1945)
Marc Riboud
[Photographer, b. 1923, St.-Genis-Laval, France, d. 2016, Paris.]
Instinctively, I feel that good photographs come from being surprised.
Julia Margaret Cameron
[Photographer, b. 1815, Calcutta, India, d. 1879, Kalutara, Ceylon.]
From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.
