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.) 
Lee Miller
[Photographer and model, b. 1907, Poughkeepsie, New York, d. 1976, Sussex, England.]
No question that German civilians knew what went on. Railway into Dachau camp runs past villa, with trains of dead or semi-dead deportees. I usually don’t take pictures of horrors. But don’t think that every town and every area isn’t rich with them. I hope Vogue will feel it can publish these pictures.
(Cable from German front, May, 1945)
Jeff Koons
[Artist, b. 1955, York, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Sex with love is a higher state. It’s an objective state, in which one lives and enters the eternal, and I believe that’s what I showed people. That’s why it wasn’t pornographic.
(On the hard-core self-portraits he made having sex with his wife Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller and exhibited under the title “Made in Heaven.”)
Lee Miller
[Photographer and model, b. 1907, Poughkeepsie, New York, d. 1976, Sussex, England.]
I took some pictures of the place [Hitler’s residence] and I also got a good night’s sleep in Hitler’s bed. I even washed the dirt of Dachau in his tub.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Newer technology provides a nonstop feed: as many images of disaster and atrocity as we can make time to look at.
Paul Virilio
[Writer and theorist, b. 1932, Paris, lives in La Rochelle, France.]
... the blinding Hiroshima flash... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war’s
recording surface, its
film.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The appetite for showing pictures of bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.
Edvard Munch
[Artist, b. 1863, Loten, Hedmark, Norway, d. 1944, Oslo, Norway.]
The camera cannot compete with painting so long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.
