David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]
Access to images and information has certainly increased, but has this led to better informed citizens? No. It has led to more docile, who spend more of their time collecting images and information… and less time on analysis, critical thinking, or real “socializing.”
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
In printing the photographs of the white-gowned Klan members I ran into considerable difficulty. There were several with uncovered faces and these faces were vividly dark in comparison to the white-white of the gowns that it was almost impossible to keep them from appearing black. I am terribly sorry.
(Apology to his editor about images from his 1951 photo essay on the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.)
Lucy Lippard
[Critic and writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.]
Photographers find themselves directly in competition with mass media’s misrepresentations of women. So the photographic terrain is particularly contested from a political point of view.
Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil—along with the evil of racism—with a camera.
Marc Riboud
[Photographer, b. 1923, St.-Genis-Laval, France, d. 2016, Paris.]
Photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world as it changes.
Susan Meiselas
[Photographer, b. 1948, Baltimore, Maryland, lives in New York.]
We know photographers make frames, but we deeply believe they can also create frameworks.
Cornell Capa (Kornél Friedmann)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1918, Budapest, Hungary, d. 2008, New York.]
With all the arguments and discussions about the Vietnam War, what did the visual image do? It ended the war.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
As Plato insisted two thousand years ago, it is not by means of the image that moral, ethical, or political knowledge is produced.
