Florence Thompson
[Migrant mother, b. 1904, Oklahoma, d. 1983, Scotts Valley, California.]
That’s my picture hanging all over the world, but I can’t get a penny out of it. What good’s it doing me?
(Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother at 75 years of age living in a trailer park near where the famous photograph was taken and surviving on $331.60 monthly social security.) 
Shomei Tomatsu
[Photographer, b. 1930, Nagoya, Japan, d. 2012, Okinawa, Japan.]
If I could, I would want to see everything: the affairs of others, the scene of a murder, the Pygmies in the African rain forest, the super-rich of Wall Street, the face of the man who stole three hundred million yen, the Sydney Opera House, the graveyard of ships in the Sargasso Sea, the tail of an orca, the plankton of the deep ocean, the inside of Prime Minister Sato’s belly, Mao Zedong, Mars, Cape Kennedy, Antarctic blizzards, the animal whose name is “sloth,” the pudendum of Marilyn Monroe. My eyes are infamously greedy:... to me, the stuff other photographers substitute for seeing is but a kind of pessimism.
Bert Stern
[Photographer, b. 1929, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2013, New York.]
... her arm was up, like waving farewell. I saw what I wanted, I pressed the button, and she was mine. It was the last picture.
(On photographing Marilyn Monroe six weeks before her death.)
Hunter Thompson
[Writer, b. 1937, Louisville, Kentucky, d. 2005, Woody Creek, Colorado.]
These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport.
(On photographs of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq)
Eve Babitz
[Model and author, b. 1943, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
You know, also I, you know, I was on those birth control pills and my breasts were like, they hurt... and, you know, it was like they blew up like. You know, they wouldn’t fit into any of my dresses. I had to quit taking those birth control pills... This was like—I mean they were like, I thought they should be photographed really... So they were, for immortality.
(On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp’s 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)
Roman Vishniac
[Photographer, b. 1897, Pavlovsk, Russia, d. 1990, New York.]
I was living in Germany in the thirties, and I knew that Hitler had made it his mission to exterminate all Jews, especially the children and the women who could bear children in the future. I was unable to save my people, only their memory.
Ernest Cole (Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole)
[Photographer, chronicler of Apartheid, b. 1940, Eersterust, South Africa, d. 1990, New York.]
In my observation of the Black man’s life in South Africa as presented in
House of Bondage, my personal attitude was committed to exposing the evils of South Africa.
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.)
