Langston Hughes
[Writer, b. 1902, Joplin, Missouri, d. 1967, New York.]
Anyday, one can walk down the street in a big city and see a thousand people. Any photographer can photograph these people—but very few photographers can make their prints not only reproductions of the people taken, but a comment upon them—or more, a comment upon their lives—or more still, a comment upon the social order that creates these lives.
Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
... I wanted to be a storyteller, tell a story. Which I hate to even admit to now, because I hate photojournalism so badly.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery, and death. You have to wade through to record them.
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
[I am] always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts.
Alfredo Jarr
[Artist, b. 1956, Santiago, Chile, lives in New York.]
As we all know, the objective and mission of the photojournalist is to show us the reality of the world. And in order to capture that reality, they go to dangerous and tragic places at the expense of their lives. I see them as the conscience of our humanity; they represent for me what is left of our humanity.
Simon Norfolk
[Photographer, b. 1963, Lagos, Nigeria, lives in Brighton, England.]
A picture that is ghostly and silent can be more eloquent and less clichéd than a “noisier” photo-journalistic approach and I have attempted to make pictures that whilst they are not “documentary” in the traditional sense, they are still documents, like forensic traces.
Robert Polidori
[Photographer, b. 1951, Montréal, Canada, lives in New York.]
Doing editorial work is like being on the road with a band. You don’t do your best shit, but you raise the level of your mediocrity and it makes you ready to do your best work when the opportunity comes along.
(Quoted by Alec Soth)
Annie Leibovitz
[Photographer, b. 1949, Westbury, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
...I gave up on being a journalist—I thought having a point of view was more important than being objective.
