Gus Blaisdell
[Writer, b. 1935, San Diego, d. 2003, Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
Photography is a medium that simultaneously enables the lurid and the immortal, a medium through which I may come to believe that my pain and that depicted are disparate.
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.)
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.
Joe Julius Heydecker
[Writer and photographer, b. 1916, Nürnberg, Germany, d. 1997, Vienna.]
I am guilty: I stood there and took photographs instead of doing something. Even then I was aware of this terrible dilemma. To ask what I could have done than is a coward’s question. Something. Kill one of the guards with my bayonet. Raise my rifle against an officer. Desert and go over to the other side. Refuse service. Sabotage. Refuse to obey orders. Give my life. Today I feel there is no excuse.
(On his trips as a Nazi soldier photographing Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. He began in 1941 and ended in 1944 when there was no ghetto and there were no Jews.)
Antonin Kratochvil
[Photographer, b. 1947, Lovisice, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
Stalin said artists are the engineers of human souls. I wanted to show what happens to the soul when the engineers get through with it.
Nhem En
[Photographer, b. 1961, Kampong Leng, Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia, lives in Cambodia.]
I knew I was taking pictures of innocent people, but I knew that if I said anything I would be killed.
(En, official photographer at Khmer Rouge torture center Tuol Sleng, estimates he took photographs of 10,000 people arriving at the center. Eight survived.)
Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]
For better or worse, the destiny of the photographer is bound up with the destinies of a machine. In this alliance is presented a very special problem. Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If it is not, the machine can destroy us. It is within the power of the photographer to help prohibit destruction, and help make the machine an agent more of good than evil.
Clarence John Laughlin
[Photographer, b. 1905, Lake Charles, Louisiana, d. 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana.]
Everything that I see must become personal; otherwise, it is dead and mechanical. Our only chance to escape the blight of mechanization, of acting and thinking alike, of the huge machine which society is becoming, is to restore life to all things through the saving and beneficent power of the human imagination.
