Martha Rosler
[Artist, b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
Documentary photography has been much more comfortable in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or programme of revolutionary politics.
Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]
For better or worse, the destiny of the photographer is bound up with the destinies of a machine. In this alliance is presented a very special problem. Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If it is not, the machine can destroy us. It is within the power of the photographer to help prohibit destruction, and help make the machine an agent more of good than evil.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
In some way I would suggest that photography is not so much an art as a meta-art. It’s an art which devours other art... photography takes the whole world as its subject, cannibalizes all art forms, and converts them into images. And in that sense it seems a peculiarly modern art form.
Giséle Freund
[Photographer, b. 1908, Berlin, Germany, d. 2000, Paris, France.]
The lens, that allegedly impartial eye, permits all possible distortions of reality... The importance of photography lies not only in the fact that it is a creation, but above all in the fact that it is one of the most effective means of shaping our ideas and influencing our behavior.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
Who needs great pictures when somebody’s dying and he’s only five years old?
(On his own photographs of starvation in Biafra)
