Robert Capa (Endre Ern? Friedmann)
[Photographer, b. 1913, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1954, Thai Binh, Vietnam.]
For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
I used to call myself a war photographer. Now I consider myself as an antiwar photographer.
Phil Stern
[Photographer, b. 1919, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 2014, Los Angeles.]
You point a camera, and you push the button. The only trouble is that your life is at stake, and I came close to being killed quite a few times. But it turns out that everything seems to work in my favor. God apparently is very generous to atheists. He fucks the believers. That’s my observation.
(On his time as a WWII army photographer.)
Eddie Adams
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, d. 2004, New York.]
How do you know you wouldn’t have pulled the trigger yourself?
(On his 1968 photograph of the summary street corner execution of prisoner Nguyen Van Lem by South Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan.)
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
... and each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that the picture might survive through the years, with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future—causing them caution and remembrance and realization.
Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]
[At Buchenwald] using the camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me.
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior which has existed throughout history by means of photography? The proportions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance. Yet, that very idea has motivated me.
Fred Ritchin
[Critic and writer, b. 1952, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
And the wars? Can our photographs do anything at all? (Or do we turn it all into image so that it will bother us less?)
