W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
Up to and including the instant of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way.
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.
Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]
... it is not a factual photograph
per se. The documentary photograph carries with it another thing, a quality in the subject that the artist responds to. It is a photograph which carries the full meaning of the episode or the circumstance or the situation that can only be revealed—because you can’t really recapture it—by this other quality. There is no real warfare between the artist and the documentary photographer. He has to be both.
William Klein
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, lives in Paris.]
Anybody who pretends to be objective isn’t realistic.
Martine Franck
[Photographer, b. 1938, Antwerp, Belgium, d. 2012, Paris.]
A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn’t the truth either. It’s more like a fleeting, subjective impression.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
I had myself echoed [Peter Henry] Emerson’s view that photography was not an art form, but I had done so without the slightest regret… It is something better than art! It rules out subjectivity, the artist’s arbitrariness; through photography it is at last possible to attain divine, total objectivity.
Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
Are pictures there for anyone to “take”? Or are they made by the photographer?
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
The journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approach; and it is impossible for him to be completely objective. Honest—yes. Objective—no.
