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)
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.
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)
Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
I thought at one time I should benefit humanity, but I don’t even know what that means anymore, and then you think, well, you’re doing it to satisfy yourself, but there’s more to yourself than just satisfying yourself too, and so I really think that it’s just that I want to leave something for somebody.
André Bazin
[Film critic and theorist, b. 1918, Angers, France, d. 1958, Nogent-sur-Marne, Île-de-France, France.]
All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.
Robert Coles
[Writer and psychiatrist, b. 1929, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Concord, Massachusetts.]
Doing documentary work is a journey, and is a little more, too, a passage across boundaries (disciplines, occupational constraints, definitions, conventions all too influentially closed for traffic), a passage that can become a quest, even a pilgrimage, a movement toward the sacred truth enshrined not only on tablets of stone, but in the living hearts of those others whom we can hear, see, and get to understand. Thereby we hope to be confirmed in our own humanity—the creature on this earth whose very nature it is to make just that kind of connection with others during the brief stay we are permitted here.
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.
