Timothy O'Sullivan
[Photographer, b. 1840, Ireland or New York (disputed), d. 1882, Staten Island, New York.]
The battle of Bull Run would have been photographed “close up” but for the fact that a shell from one of the rebel field-pieces took away the photographer’s camera.
John Steinbeck
[Writer, b. 1902, Salinas, California, d. 1968, Sag Harbor, New York.]
The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.
Sabrina Harman
[U.S. military guard at Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq, b. 1978, Lorton, Virginia, lives in Virginia.]
If I come up to you and I’m like, “Hey this is going on,” you probably wouldn’t believe me unless I had something to show you. So if I say “Hey this is going on. Look, I have proof,” you can’t deny it, I guess.
(On why she took the infamous photos of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq)
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
...there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don’t practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: “I didn’t kill that man on that photograph, I didn’t starve that child.” That’s why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.
Cornell Capa (Kornél Friedmann)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1918, Budapest, Hungary, d. 2008, New York.]
With all the arguments and discussions about the Vietnam War, what did the visual image do? It ended the war.
Allan deSouza
[Artist and writer, b. 1958, Nairobi, Kenya, lives in Los Angeles.]
Photography is now so vital to memory, as a safeguard that the past will not be erased. With the Jewish Holocaust, for example, photographs have become so central to the process of remembering—not necessarily private, but certainly collective, and ironically, we often rely, as with the Khmer Rouge, on the photographs taken by the murderers.
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
In a way, if an individual assumes the risk of placing himself in the middle of a war to communicate to the rest of the world what’s happening, he’s trying to negotiate for peace. Perhaps that’s the reason for those in charge of perpetuating the war do not like to have photographers around.
Carl Mydans
[Photographer, b. 1907, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 2004, New York.]
... I think it is fair to say that all war photographers hide behind their cameras. I hid behind mine for years and years and years. It was a shield... I think that the photographer in combat has a greater protection than the soldier who has a rifle in his hand. That camera has unbelievable protective power.
