James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
If I cave in, if I fold up because of the emotional obstacles that are in front of me, I’m useless. There is no point in me being there in the first place. And I think if you go to places where people are experiencing these kinds of tragedies with a camera, you have a responsibility. The value of it is to make an appeal to the rest of the world, to create an impetus where change is possible through public opinion. Public opinion is created through awareness. My job is to help create the awareness.
Kansuke Yamagata
[Photographer and poet, b. 1914, Nagoya, Japan, d. 1987, Nagoya.]
What is a good photograph?... To put it concisely, good photos aim at revolution... They emerge from everyday events and connect to revolution.
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
The richness of our contemporary visual world must be seen as a danger. It is an overwhelming and oppressive world. A world that manifests itself fundamentally through the image is only a few steps from totalitarian manipulation.
Marilyn Nance
[Photographer and artist, b. 1953, New York, lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.]
Things haven’t really changed for black folks, and we know it. The old folks know it. The middle-aged folks know it. Young folks know it—we all know it. We nod to each other when we see ourselves on the street. (That’s why white folks think all black folks know each other.) We share a secret... that we are human beings, that we love, that we invent, that we brush our teeth, that we vacuum our rugs, that we throw out our junk mail. All of that. We carry in each of us all the stories that are withheld from the history books and kept out of the media, erased from common knowledge. My work deals with the souls of black folks and our quest for social change... I’m being asked to tell my story of how things haven't really changed.
John Tagg
[Writer, theorist, and photohistorian, b. 1949, North Shields, England, lives in Ithica, New York.]
[Photography’s] status as a technology varies with the power relations that invest it. Its nature as a practice depends upon the institutions and agents that define it and set it to work.
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
Today, looking at images from Sierra Leone or the Congo, one can feel horror, disgust, and great sadness—but what to do in response is much less apparent. Which of the twelve militias now fighting in the Congo do you support? Visual atrocity is much clearer today, but we no longer have the political clarity to accompany it.
Robert Kennedy
[Politician, b. 1925, Brookline, Massachusetts, d. 1968, Los Angeles, California.]
I examined the pictures carefully, and what I saw appeared to be no more than the clearing of a field for a farm or the basement of a house. I was relieved to hear later that this was the same reaction of virtually everyone at the meeting, including President Kennedy. Even a few days later, when more work had taken place on the site, he remarked that it looked like a football field.
(On aerial photographs that triggered the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.)
Geoffrey Batchen
[Photohistorian, b. 1956, Australia, lives in Wellington, New Zealand.]
Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for “real” powers that always originate elsewhere.
