Ansel Adams
[Photographer, b. 1902, San Francisco, d. 1984, Carmel, California.]
I expect to retire to a fine-grained heaven where the temperatures are always consistent, where the images slide before ones eyes in a continual cascade of form and meaning.
George Rodger
[Photojournalist, b. 1908, Hale, Cheshire, England, d. 1995, Smarden, Kent, England.]
When I discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen—4,000 dead and starving lying around—and think only of a nice photographic composition, I knew something had happened to me and it had to stop.
Bert Hardy
[Photographer, b. 1913, London, d. 1995, Oxted, England.]
Although I do not usually like taking pictures of corpses, I controlled my feelings of rage for long enough to take some; without such evidence, no one would believe that anything like this had ever happened.
(On photographing the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 19, 1945)
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.... One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany.
Herman Melville
[Writer, b. 1819, New York, d. 1891, New York.]
To the devil with you and your Daguerreotype!
(1852)
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
Every image of barbarism—of immiseration, humiliation, terror, extermination—embraces its opposite, though sometimes unknowingly. Every image of suffering says not only, “This is so,” but also, by implication: “This must stop.”
Justine Kurland
[Photographer, b. 1969, Warsaw, New York, lives mostly on the road.]
The naked figures in the landscape have willingly undressed for my camera. They are either perfect beings heroically occupying their Edens, or else they are gardeners after the Fall, lost and exposed to both the elements and the lens.
Dmitri Baltermants
[Photographer, b. 1912, Warsaw, Poland, d. 1990, Moscow.]
We photographers make magnificent shots of wars, fires, earthquakes, and murder: the grief of humanity. We would like to see photographs about joy, happiness and love, but on the same level of quality. I realize, though, that this is difficult.
