Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
I just think it’s important to be direct and honest with people about why you’re photographing them and what you’re doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul, and I think you have to be clear about that.
Richard Avedon
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 2004, San Antonio, Texas.]
If each photograph steals a bit of the soul, isn’t it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture?
Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman)
[Singer, songwriter, and artist, b. 1941, Hibbing, Minnesota, lives in Malibu, California.]
It rubs me the wrong way, a camera... It’s a frightening thing. Cameras make ghosts out of people.
Crazy Horse (Tasunka Witko)
[Leader of the Oglala Sioux, b. 1849, Lakota lands, d. 1877, Fort Robinson, Nebraska.]
My friend, why should you wish to shorten my life by taking from me my shadow?
(To photographer Dr. Valentine T. McGillycuddy.)
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
...people have always known, at least since Moses denounced the Golden Calf, that images were dangerous, that they can captivate the onlooker and steal the soul.
John Pfahl
[Photographer, b. 1939, New York, lives in Buffalo, New York.]
People think the camera steals their soul. Places, I am convinced, are affected in the opposite direction. The more they are photographed (or drawn and painted) the more soul they seem to accumulate.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.
Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
Don’t you think that it is necessary to have a sense of brutality in photography?
