Sabrina Harman
[U.S. military guard at Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq, b. 1978, Lorton, Virginia, lives in Virginia.]
On June 23 I saw my first dead body I took pictures! The other day I heard my first grenade go off. Fun!
(To her father, June 23, 2003, written from Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq) 
Terence Donovan
[Photographer, b. 1936, Stepney, England, d. 1996, London.]
Don’t buy a Hasselblad unless you have a tripod and an assistant. If you drop the magazine, it tends to be embarrassing, like trying to spoon up your guacamole in Acapulco. When I see a Hampstead gynaecologist on holiday festooned with a Hasselblad and lenses and no tripod, I know he is a photographer wanker.
Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent... the camera.
Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
I just don’t know what makes a picture, really—the thing that makes it is something unique, as far as I can understand. Just like one guy can write a sentence and it’s beautiful and another one can write it and it’s dead. What the difference is, I don’t know.
Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
There is no place in the postmodern world for a belief in the authenticity of experience, in the sanctity of the individual artist’s vision, in genius or originality. What postmodern art finally tells us is that things have been used up, that we are at the end of the line, that we are all prisoners of what we see. Clearly these are disconcerting and radical ideas, and it takes no great imagination to see that photography, as a nearly indiscriminate producer of images, is in large part responsible for them.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
Images are no longer what they used to be. They can’t be trusted any more. We all know that. You know that. When we grew up, images were telling stories and showing them. Now they’re all into selling. They’ve changed under our very eyes. They don’t even know how to do it anymore. They’ve plain forgotten. Images are selling out the world. And at a big discount.
Ishiuchi Miyako
[Photographer, b. 1947, Gunma Prefecture, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
I cannot stop [taking photographs of scars] because they are so much like a photograph… They are visible events, recorded in the past. Both the scars and the photographs are the manifestation of sorrow for the many things which cannot be retrieved...
Anna Nicole Smith (Vicki Lynn Marshall)
[Model, b. 1967, Houston, Texas, d. 2007, Hollywood, Florida.]
He’s comming to meet me on Sun. Cant wait!!... Please God let him love me!!... This could be it [followed by five happy faces].... Hes going to publish my pictures Im so glad I didn’t sleep with him either!... I hate for men to want sex all the time. I hate sex anyway.
(1992, diary entry as she prepares for a meeting with Paul Marciano, head of Guess.)
