W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
It’s not a matter of looking, it’s a matter of seeing.
(Quoted by photographer Edouard Boubat) 
Bernard-Henri Lévy
[Writer and critic, b. 1948, Béni Saf, Algeria, lives in St-Paul-de-Vence, France.]
No one wants to see; no one wants to hear. We have to force them to see it, then. There has to be a terrorism of the gaze.
Frederick Wiseman
[Filmmaker and Documentarian, b. 1930, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Boston.]
The effort to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]
If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything.
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
Your sight does not master the pictures, it is the pictures that master your sight.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
The blind are not totally blind. Reality is not totally real.
Josef Koudelka
[Photographer, b. 1938, Biskovice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, lives in Paris.]
I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling.
