Eddie Adams
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, d. 2004, New York.]
I always tell photographers that you never know who is looking at your pictures or how your pictures are going to affect other people’s lives. I wasn’t out to save the world. I was out to get a story.
(On his 1968 photograph of the summary street corner execution of prisoner Nguyen Van Lem by South Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan.) 
Frederick Sommer
[Photographer, b. 1905, Angri, Italy, d. 1999, Prescott, Arizona.]
There isn’t a lot that can be done about taking a good photograph... You have to accept an involved set of circumstances. And this involved set of circumstances is extraordinary and great for the simple reason that you don’t understand it.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
It was obvious that, come what may, I had to free myself from photography. I had always considered photography to be a mere springboard to my real self but, lo and behold, the springboard would not let me go. Sometimes I was close to despair.
Seydou Keïta
[Photographer, b. circa 1921, Bamako, Mali, d. 2001, Paris.]
You have to understand, it’s been a long time since I stopped taking photos, but as you can see I really loved photography. All my work is here in this chest.
Elliott Erwitt
[Photographer, b. 1928, Paris, France, lives in New York.]
You have to devote yourself totally to be successful at it.
Brian Duffy
[Photographer, b. 1933, London, d. 2010, London.]
I went into a burning mode. I felt everything I had to do and say in photography had been done. [Irving Penn and Richard Avedon] fucked photography for us... They got there.
(1979, On giving up photography and burning all his negatives)
Günter Grass
[Writer, b. 1927, Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk, Poland), d. 2015, Lübeck, Germany.]
If there is a hell in wait for us, I know what one of the more fiendish torments will be: they will shut up the naked soul in a room with the photographs of his day: Quick, turn on the pathos: O man beneath the glare of flash bulbs, O man standing erect by the leaning tower of Pisa. O photomaton man who must expose his right ear if he is to be worthy of a passport.
Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
The fact is, when I look in the viewfinder, if I do see it as a picture, I’ll do something to change it. Because, in the end, the pictures that you see when you’re working are the pictures that you know already. Either somebody else’s made them, or you’ve done it already. I’m not interested in that.
