David Douglas Duncan
[Photojournalist, b. 1916, Kansas City, Missouri, lives in Mougins, France.]
It’s very simple... this banging around with a camera and typewriter as a “business” is just one helluva lot of fun.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The horror is this: nothing to say about the death of one whom I love most, nothing to say about her photograph… I have no other recourse than this irony: to speak of the “nothing to say.”
Lee Friedlander
[Photographer, b. 1934, Aberdeen, Washington, lives in New York.]
I always wanted to be a photographer. I was fascinated with the materials. But I never dreamed I would be having this much fun. I imagined something much less elusive, much more mundane.
Alec Soth
[Photographer, b. 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.]
Fun is important. You should like the process and the subject. If you are bored or unhappy with your subject it will show up in the pictures.
Horst Faas
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, Berlin, Germany, d. 2012, Munich, Germany.]
To get the best picture of a captured prisoner, you have to get him just as he is captured. The expression he wears then is lost forever... The human mechanism is remarkably recuperative. A half hour later, the expressions are gone, the faces have changed. The mother with the dead baby in her arms does not look griefstruck anymore, no matter what she feels.
Luc Delahaye
[Photographer, b. 1962, Tours, France, lives in Paris.]
The denunciation of suffering by photography has replaced the religious justification of suffering in painting. Denunciation is a function of photojournalism, and in itself that’s a step in the right direction.
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.
Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough.
