Luc Delahaye
[Photographer, b. 1962, Tours, France, lives in Paris.]
The denunciation of suffering by photography has replaced the religious justification of suffering in painting. Denunciation is a function of photojournalism, and in itself that’s a step in the right direction.
Sebastião Salgado
[Photographer, b. 1944, Aimores, Minas Gerias, Brazil, lives in Paris and Brazil.]
I can be an artist
a posteriori, not
a priori. If my pictures tell the story, our story, human story, then in a hundred years, then they can be considered an art reference, but now they are not made as art. I’m a journalist. My life’s on the road, my studio is the planet.
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.)
Joe Rosenthal
[Photographer, b. 1911, Washington, D.C., d. 2006, Novato, California.]
I swung my camera around and held it until I could guess that this was the peak of the action, and shot. I couldn’t positively say I had the picture. It’s something like shooting a football play; you don’t brag until it’s developed.
(On his photograph of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima.)
Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
I wanted to present the way kids see things, but without all this baggage... You know... they’re living in the moment not thinking about anything beyond that and that’s what I wanted to catch. And I wanted the viewer to feel like you’re there with them—you can be there fucking, smoking dope, having sex.
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
I attempt to become as totally responsible to the subject as I possibly can. The act of being an outsider aiming a camera can be a violation of humanity. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person’s predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other, and to that extent I can accept myself.
Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
By making a frame you’re being selective, then you edit the pictures you want published and you’re being selective again. You develop a point of view that you want to express. You try to go into a situation with an open mind, but then you form an opinion, and you express it in your photographs.
Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
I would arrive at midnight, the cop at the information desk would be dozing... The police Teletype machine would be singing a song of crime and violence... Crime was my oyster, and I liked it.
