Anne Frank
[Writer, b. 1929, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1945, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Germany.]
This is a photo as I would wish myself to look all the time. Then I would maybe have a chance to come to Hollywood.
(10, October, 1942; Handwritten inscription on a photograph) 
Richard Misrach
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in San Francisco.]
I’m not interested in victim photography. Photographing people suffering and putting it on a museum wall is too weird.
Cornell Capa (Kornél Friedmann)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1918, Budapest, Hungary, d. 2008, New York.]
With all the arguments and discussions about the Vietnam War, what did the visual image do? It ended the war.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
We hate to look at his [Donald McCullin’s] pictures, but we have to. McCullin is the eye we cannot shut.
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
For me the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke humanity. If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
The problem with photography is that you can decontextualize war. What does a picture of a wounded body, or a mother clasping her wounded child mean? Why is it happening? I want to know that. I’m not satisfied just photographing little sorts of visual climaxes to a conflict. I want to know what led up to it and what’s going to happen next.
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
Every image of barbarism—of immiseration, humiliation, terror, extermination—embraces its opposite, though sometimes unknowingly. Every image of suffering says not only, “This is so,” but also, by implication: “This must stop.”
Sabrina Harman
[U.S. military guard at Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq, b. 1978, Lorton, Virginia, lives in Virginia.]
On June 23 I saw my first dead body I took pictures! The other day I heard my first grenade go off. Fun!
(To her father, June 23, 2003, written from Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq)
