James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
I used to call myself a war photographer. Now I consider myself as an antiwar photographer.
Phil Stern
[Photographer, b. 1919, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 2014, Los Angeles.]
You point a camera, and you push the button. The only trouble is that your life is at stake, and I came close to being killed quite a few times. But it turns out that everything seems to work in my favor. God apparently is very generous to atheists. He fucks the believers. That’s my observation.
(On his time as a WWII army photographer.)
Roman Vishniac
[Photographer, b. 1897, Pavlovsk, Russia, d. 1990, New York.]
I was living in Germany in the thirties, and I knew that Hitler had made it his mission to exterminate all Jews, especially the children and the women who could bear children in the future. I was unable to save my people, only their memory.
Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff)
[Artist, b. 1935, Gabrova, Bulgaria, lives in New York.]
Two Nazi commandos defended the Reichstag like mad, step by step, floor by floor, with the same lack of purpose as the Russians who lost two thousand men in attempting to take hold of it. I have the feeling that they were sacrificed for a mere photograph, the famous photograph of the Russian soldier waving the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag.
Lynsey Addario
[Photographer, b. 1973, Norwalk, Connecticut, lives in Islington, England.]
I choose to live in peace and witness war—to experience the worst in people but to remember the beauty.
David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]
The attack on New York’s Twin Towers was the most photographed event in history. It was clearly planned and executed to maximize imaging. The delay between the two crashes seemed calculated to allow cameras—in what is arguably the most densely camera-rich environment in the world—to turn en masse toward the towers like a field of phototropic sunflowers.
Nhem En
[Photographer, b. 1961, Kampong Leng, Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia, lives in Cambodia.]
My only job was to photograph them, and it was someone else who tortured and killed these people. As a photographer, I had no right to beat, torture, or kill prisoners. I could not touch them.
(En, official photographer at Khmer Rouge torture center Tuol Sleng, estimates he took photographs of 10,000 people arriving at the center. Eight survived.)
Shomei Tomatsu
[Photographer, b. 1930, Nagoya, Japan, d. 2012, Okinawa, Japan.]
When I am faced with the victims of the bomb, I find myself almost praying as I release the shutter of my camera. It is as if they are the God of the fin-de-siècle, Christ of the nuclear age.
