Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The literal photograph reduces us to the scandal of horror, not to the horror itself.
Eugene Richards
[Photographer, b. 1944, Dorchester, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]
…it is pretentious for photographers to believe that their pictures alone change things. If they did, we wouldn’t be besieged by war, by incidents of genocide, by hunger. A more realistic assessment of photography’s value is to point out that it is illustrative of what’s going on, that it provides a record of history, that photographs can prompt dialogue.
Shomei Tomatsu
[Photographer, b. 1930, Nagoya, Japan, d. 2012, Okinawa, Japan.]
When I am faced with the victims of the bomb, I find myself almost praying as I release the shutter of my camera. It is as if they are the God of the fin-de-siècle, Christ of the nuclear age.
Donald Rumsfeld
[Bureaucrat, U.S. Secretary of Defense, b. 1932, Chicago, lives in St. Michaels, Maryland.]
It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place.
(On photographs from Abu Ghraib prison.)
...people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.
(On photographs from Abu Ghraib prison.)
Hu?nh Công “Nick” Ut
[Photographer, b. 1951, rural Mekong Delta, province of Long An, Vietnam, lives in Los Angeles.]
Nick see her skin coming off and stopped [taking photographs]. I didn’t want her to die too.
(On stopping photography in order to take napalmed child Kim Phuc to the hospital after her village of Trang Bang, Vietnam was bombed in 1972.)
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.)
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems “aesthetic;” that is, too much like art.
