Joe Rosenthal
[Photographer, b. 1911, Washington, D.C., d. 2006, Novato, California.]
Had I posed that shot, I would, of course, have ruined it. I’d have picked fewer men... I would also have made them turn their heads so that they could be identified for AP members throughout the country and nothing like the existing picture would have resulted.
(On his photograph of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima.) 
Alexander Gardner
[Photographer, b. 1821, Paisley, Scotland, d. 1882, Washington, D.C.]
Such a picture [
A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg battlefield, July, 1863] conveys a useful moral: It shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to the pageantry. Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation.
(1866)
Martha Rosler
[Artist, b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
Women war photographers had to fight on two fronts: the bombs, and the men.
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.
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians… have not been able to put an end to war. Why place that demand on photography?
Bert Hardy
[Photographer, b. 1913, London, d. 1995, Oxted, England.]
Although I do not usually like taking pictures of corpses, I controlled my feelings of rage for long enough to take some; without such evidence, no one would believe that anything like this had ever happened.
(On photographing the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 19, 1945)
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
I’m like an old junkie, in a way. You don’t stick syringes in your arm—you go straight for the most important part of your body, the brain. You are destroying it the moment you go to your first war.
Robert Capa (Endre Ern? Friedmann)
[Photographer, b. 1913, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1954, Thai Binh, Vietnam.]
If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.
