Donald Rumsfeld
[Bureaucrat, U.S. Secretary of Defense, b. 1932, Chicago, lives in St. Michaels, Maryland.]
Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.
Nhem En
[Photographer, b. 1961, Kampong Leng, Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia, lives in Cambodia.]
I knew I was taking pictures of innocent people, but I knew that if I said anything I would be killed.
(En, official photographer at Khmer Rouge torture center Tuol Sleng, estimates he took photographs of 10,000 people arriving at the center. Eight survived.)
Malcolm Browne
[Journalist and photographer, b. 1931, New York, d. 2012, New Hampshire.]
Had a western newsman with a camera not been present at Quang Duc’s suicide, history might have taken a different turn.
(On his 1963 photograph of self-immolation of South Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc.)
John Vachon
[Photographer, b. 1914, St. Paul, Minnesota, d. 1975, New York.]
One becomes keenly alive to the seeking of picture material. It becomes part of your existence to make a visual report on a particular place or environment.
Werner Bischof
[Photographer, b. 1916, Zürich, Switzerland, d. 1954, Peña de Aguila, Peru.]
When the war came, with it came the destruction of my ivory tower. Henceforth my attention would focus on the face of human suffering, something I saw a thousand times over on the Swiss-Austrian border... stranded children and old people, behind them exploding grenades and speeding armored cars.
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (Elizabeth Rigby)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1809, London, d. 1893, London.]
Thus are the incidents of time, and the forms of space, simultaneously recorded; and every picture becomes an authentic chapter in the history of the world.
(1857)
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
If photographs are our connection to the past, it’s a very peculiar, fragile, sentimental connection. You take a photograph before you destroy something. The photograph is its posthumous existence.
Werner Bischof
[Photographer, b. 1916, Zürich, Switzerland, d. 1954, Peña de Aguila, Peru.]
In the long run I don't think anyone can overlook these images of hunger, that people can ignore all my pictures—no, definitely not. And even if only a vague impression remains, in time this will create a basis that will help people distinguish between what is good and what is objectionable.
