Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
Photography is very subjective. Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie.
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The objectivity of the camera, used wrongly, is the very devil.
Arthur Koestler
[Writer, b. 1905, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1983, London, England.]
The “innocent eye” is a fiction, based on the absurd notion that what we perceive in the present can be isolated in the mind from the influence of past experience There is no perception of “pure form” but meaning seeps in, and settles on the image.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
The truth is somewhere between the documentary and the fictional, and that is what I try to show. What is real one moment has become imaginary the next. You believe what you see now, and the next second you don’t anymore.
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
The flow of reality has contours and dimensions much like the flow of a river. The characteristics of the current depend on the channel, whether it is a product of history or geology. Documentary photography has similar properties. The images I create are a confluence of what is in front of me and what is inside of me. They are objective and subjective at the same time, and they must be seen that way by the viewer in order to be convincing.
Abelardo Morell
[b. 1948, Havana, Cuba, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]
It’s important to me to have what I photograph undergo a certain transformation—to become a thing different from what we are used to, to be another version of itself.
Annie Leibovitz
[Photographer, b. 1949, Westbury, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we’re really talking about here is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that’s when you start taking pictures.
