Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
Until a few years ago, I was able to stave off an awareness that there is not an ounce of beauty in the world, and that humanity is a thing of extreme hideousness. So I could shoot and believe in something.
(1972) 
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
Photographs illuminate the terribly damaged family of man to which, I’m afraid, we all belong.
Martin Parr
[Photographer, b. 1952, Epson, Surrey, England, lives in Bristol and London, England.]
Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That’s the great thing about photography.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
Communications technologies—photographic reproduction, linked computers—provide strong tools for the instrumental channeling of human desire… disguised as a benign expansion of the field of human intimacy.
(2002)
Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]
Every time we describe an event, add up a column of figures, or take a photograph of a tree, we create a model; without models we would know nothing about reality and would be like animals.
Cornell Capa (Kornél Friedmann)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1918, Budapest, Hungary, d. 2008, New York.]
When you look at my work, you will notice the absence of still lifes and landscapes. I am interested in human beings, their lives, their habitats, their behavior, and their relationships, familial and beyond.
George Santayana
[Philosopher and writer, b. 1863, Madrid, Spain, d. 1952, Rome, Italy.]
As students of zoology put on their slides infinitely fine and numerous sections of the specimens they study, so the photographer can furnish for the instruction of posterity infinitely fine and numerous cross-sections of the present world of men.
(1912)
André Malraux
[Writer, critic, and politician, b. 1901, Paris, d. 1975, Paris.]
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.
