Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
I had so many unsold murder pictures lying around my room... I felt as if I were renting out a wing of the City Morgue.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
There is no doubt that my photographs have a very strong religious overtone, they are like twentieth century icons. When human beings are suffering, they tend to look up, as if hoping for salvation. And that’s when I press the button.
Someone may have been killed by the wayside and his body is rotting away and nobody cares that it was a human being and it was a person—a living person. I care, and I’m going to photograph it—as horrible as it looks, I’m going to photograph it.
Malick Sidibé
[Photographer, b. 1935, Soloba, Mali, d. 2016, Bamako, Mali.]
Man tried to imitate God by drawing; then we invented the photo.
Josef Koudelka
[Photographer, b. 1938, Biskovice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, lives in Paris.]
Devastation is photogenic.
Louis Stettner
[Photographer, b. 1922, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2016, Saint-Ouen, France.]
My photographs are acts of eloquent homage and deep remorse about [New York City]. I am profoundly moved by its lyric beauty and horrified by its cruelty and suffering.
Kim Phúc
[Human being, subject of iconic photograph, b. 1963, Trang Bang, South Vietnam, lives in Ajax, Canada.]
That photograph is more powerful than bombs.
(On the photograph of her as a nine-year-old fleeing the village of Trang Bang, Vietnam after it was napalm bombed by the United States in 1972.)
Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
I need [as models] physical marvels—a person, thing or act so extraordinary as to inspire wonder: someone with wings, horns, tails, fins, claws, reversed feet, head, hands. Anyone with additional arms, legs, eyes, breasts, genitals, ears, nose, lips, head. Anyone without a face. Pinheads, dwarfs, giants, Satyrs. A woman with one breast (center); a woman with breast so large as to require Daliesque supports; women whose faces are covered with hair or large skin lesions and willing to pose in evening gowns. Active and retired sideshow performers, contortionists (erotic), anyone with a parasitic twin, people who live as comic book heroes. Boot, corset, and bondage fetishists, a beautiful woman with functional appendages in place of arms, anorexics (preferably bald), the romantic and criminally insane (nude only). All manner of extreme visual perversions. A young blonde girl with two faces. Hermaphrodites and taratoids (alive and dead). Beings from other planets. Anyone bearing the wounds of Christ. Anyone claiming to be God. God.
