Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery, and death. You have to wade through to record them.
Roman Opalka
[Artist, b. 1931, Hocquincourt, France, d. 2011, Rome.]
These obsessions—death, disappearance, the irreversibility of time—are difficult, courageous, suicidal. In fact, my attitude has been likened to suicide, sacrifice. People have often thought I was the prisoner of my idea. In fact, I just couldn’t do anything else.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it I felt very perverse.
Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
I go into every story thinking I’m going to fail. I think about that all the time—I think it’s going to be terrible. Every story is like the first I’ve ever done.
Shelby Lee Adams
[Photographer, b. 1950, Hazard, Kentucky, lives in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
[My] portraits are, in a way, self-portraits that represent a long autobiographical exploration of creativity, imagination, vision, repulsion and salvation. My greatest fear as a photographer is to look into the eyes of my subject and not see my own reflection.
Gueorgui Pinkhassov
[Photographer, b. 1952, Moscow, lives in Paris.]
The only thing that counts is curiosity. For me personally, this is what creativity is about. It will express itself less in the fear of doing the same thing over again than in the desire not to go where one has already been.
Gregory Crewdson
[Photographer, b. 1962, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New Haven Connecticut.]
My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear.
Carl Mydans
[Photographer, b. 1907, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 2004, New York.]
I followed [the boys] to the stakes as the as the cries from the crowds rose higher and higher. The boy’s hands were shaking. And I saw that mine were also. What, among men, is more frightening than the cry for death which rises from the crowd? ... I tried to hold my camera steady as I stepped up to each of them, one by one. I was not in good control. But each in his turn surprised me: for as each saw the camera coming in toward him, his body straightened and he threw back his shoulders and a look of courage came into his face. Inexplicably, that last picture gave strength to the condemned men.
