Nathan Lyons
[Photographer, writer, and curator, b. 1930, Jamaica, New York, d. 2016, Rochester, New York.]
The accidents of millions of amateurs devoid of a picture vocabulary—which produced an outpouring of multiple exposures, distortions, unusual perspectives, foreshortening of planes, imbalance—has contributed greatly to the visual vocabulary of all media since before the turn of the century.
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.)
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
By nature, the photograph... has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. It is as if the photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
With digitalization you can change parts of the picture very easily. It’s not serious if you do it for yourself, or within the arts, but in my eyes it’s a crime if you do it for the news.
Edouard Boubat
[Photographer, b. 1923, Paris, France, d. 1999, Paris.]
Millions of unnecessary photos are taken every day. People stand before the Pyramids and photograph them, when for three cents they could buy postcards which show them much better.
Anthony Aziz, Sammy Cucher
The buzz and excitement generated by media technologies are but a logical reaction in a culture steeped in materialism: it creates the illusion that we can reduce every mental act into matter, with no regard to how poor or incomplete that alchemy might be. As the technology progresses and the possibility of manipulating and communicating exclusively with images grows, mental spaces will be eradicated, fixed into flattened expanses of unambiguous surfaces.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
What we get to think and know about the world is in the hands of a very few... A truly informed public is antithetical to the interests of modern consumer capital.
David Burnett
[Photojournalist, b. 1946, Salt Lake City, Utah, lives in Arlington, Virginia.]
The satisfaction comes from working next to 500 photographers and coming away with something different.
