Berenice Abbott
[Photographer, writer, teacher, b. 1898, Springfield, Ohio, d. 1991, Monson, Maine.]
I’m not a nice girl; I’m a photographer.
(On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that “a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods”) 
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
We are spinning a story of what it is to grow up. It’s a complicated story and sometimes we try to take on the grand themes: anger, love, death, sensuality and beauty. Without fear and without shame.
Frieda Kahlo (Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón)
[Artist, b. 1907, Mexico City, d. 1954, Mexico City.]
When my father took my picture in 1932 after my accident, I knew that a battlefield of suffering was in my eyes. From then on, I started looking straight at the lens, unflinching, unsmiling, determined to show that I was a good fighter to the end.
(On her father Guillermo Kahlo, 1871-1941, a photographer)
Robert Capa (Endre Ern? Friedmann)
[Photographer, b. 1913, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1954, Thai Binh, Vietnam.]
I had it bad. The empty camera trembled in my hands. It was a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face.
(Remembrance of landing on Omaha Beach, D-Day.)
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
The courage to believe we don’t know what we think we know is the first stage of the discovery process.
Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
...there is the continual constraint of living everyday life to deal with. A kind of fury grows as a result because we are not really free. Then there comes a sort of slow boiling up inside so that finally we explode. Then, abruptly, there is that exasperation that at one moment translates itself into a need to be filled with wonder, a need for a kind of happiness of the eye and a need to look with intensity and with courage.
Martha Rosler
[Artist, b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
Documentary testifies, finally, to the bravery or (dare we name it?) the manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer, who entered a situation of physical danger, social restrictedness, human decay, or combinations of these and saved us the trouble.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
...the fear of the image, the anxiety that the “power of images” may finally destroy even their creators and manipulators, is as old as image-making itself.
