Paul Graham
[Photographer, b. 1956, Stafford, England, lives in New York.]

 The problem is that the term “documentary” is used to describe nearly every photographer who works from life-as-it-is. If someone makes food with vegetables from their garden, are they doing documentary cooking? 

Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]

 You know, you’ve heard photographers talk about how they want to know the place better and so on—they’re really talking about their own comfort. Let me put it this way—I have never seen a photograph from which I could tell how long the photographer was there, how well he knew it. 

Donna Ferrato
[Photographer, b. 1949, Waltham, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]

 What makes me really happy is to get deep into the muck and juicy good stuff of people’s lives. 

Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]

 For some reason or other there was in me the desire to see the world clean and fresh and alive, as primitive things are clean and fresh and alive. The so-called documentary picture left me wanting something. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]

 I’m not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It’s drowning yourself, dissolving yourself and then sniff, sniff, sniff—being sensitive to coincidence. You can’t go looking for it; you can’t want it, or you won’t get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens. 

Anthony Hernandez
[Photographer, b. 1947, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]

 Nobody else was looking. And that’s why people will see what I’ve seen... that’s what I’ve forced them to do with these pictures. 

Martha Rosler
[Artist, b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]

 Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.) 

Clarence John Laughlin
[Photographer, b. 1905, Lake Charles, Louisiana, d. 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana.]

 Let us see as steadily and completely as possible the realities of our age: the wasted lives, the scattered and misused resources (human and material), the steel magic of the misdirected machinery, the mad clockwork tragedy of it all. 
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