Simon Norfolk
[Photographer, b. 1963, Lagos, Nigeria, lives in Brighton, England.]
[My] pictures are about memory and forgetfulness. The evidence is dissolving. Bones crumble; human ash returns to soil; teeth, sandals, hair, bullets, axes disperse into atoms and molecules. Footprints in the snow will be erased by the next storm. The evidence of evil, like the evidence of good, obeys the universal laws of entropy. Heat cools, matter disintegrates, memories fade. If we let them.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
I am sometimes accused by my peers of printing my pictures too dark. All I can say is that it goes with the mood of melancholy that is induced by witnessing at close quarters such intractable situations of conflict and joylessness.
Alfredo Jarr
[Artist, b. 1956, Santiago, Chile, lives in New York.]
Reality cannot be photographed or represented. We can only create a new reality. And my dilemma is how to make art out of a reality that most of us would rather ignore. How do you make art when the world is in such a state? My answer has been to make mistakes, but when I can, to
choose them. We are all guilt victims choosing mistakes, and as Godard said, the very definition of the human condition is in the
mise-en-scéne itself.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.
Larry Burrows
[Photographer, b. 1926, London, d. 1971, Laos.]
Do I have the right to carry on working and leave a man suffering? To my mind, the answer is no, you have got to help him... You cannot go through these elements without, obviously feeling something yourself—you cannot be mercenary in this way because it will make you less of a photographer...
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
Who needs great pictures when somebody’s dying and he’s only five years old?
(On his own photographs of starvation in Biafra)
Francis Bacon
[Artist, b. 1909, Dublin, Ireland, d. 1992, Madrid, Spain.]
Jesus would have been one of the best photographers that ever existed. He was always looking at the beauty of people’s souls.
Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]
[At Buchenwald] using the camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me.
