Hunter Thompson
[Writer, b. 1937, Louisville, Kentucky, d. 2005, Woody Creek, Colorado.]

 These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport. (On photographs of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq) 

Slim Aarons
[Photographer, b. 1916, New York, d. 2006, Montrose, New York.]

 The only beach I was interested in landing on was one decorated with beautiful seminude girls tanning in a tranquil sun. (On declining a photojournalism offer to cover the Korean War) 

Fred Ritchin
[Critic and writer, b. 1952, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]

 And the wars? Can our photographs do anything at all? (Or do we turn it all into image so that it will bother us less?) 

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

 The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks! (1930s) 

Robert Capa (Endre Ern? Friedmann)
[Photographer, b. 1913, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1954, Thai Binh, Vietnam.]

 I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life. (At the end of World War II.) 

Tim Page
[Photographer, b. 1944, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, lives in Brisbane, Australia.]

 Every good war picture becomes an anti-war picture. 

Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]

 Every image of barbarism—of immiseration, humiliation, terror, extermination—embraces its opposite, though sometimes unknowingly. Every image of suffering says not only, “This is so,” but also, by implication: “This must stop.” 

Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]

 Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget. 
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