Ron Haeberle
[Photographer, b. 1941, Cleveland, Ohio, lives in Cleveland.]
I happened upon a group of GIs surrounding these people and one of the American GIs yelled out, “Hey he’s got a camera.” So they kind of all dispersed just a little bit, and I came upon them and looking at the photograph I noticed the one girl was kind of frantic and an older woman trying to protect this small child and the older woman in front was just, you know, kind of pleading, trying to, beg, you know, begging and that and another person, a woman was buttoning her blouse and holding a small baby. Okay, I took the photograph, I thought they were just going to question the people, but just as soon as I turned and walked away, I heard firing, I looked around and over the corner of my shoulder I saw the people drop. I just kept on walking.
(On photographing the My Lai massacre, Vietnam, March, 1968.) 
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
Today, the photographer is sent off to illustrate the preconceptions, usually misconceptions, of the desk-bound editor—an editor biased not by any knowledge of the subject but by the pressure to conform to the standard view ordained by the powers that be. Any deviation from the ‘party line’ is rejected. We are probably the last generation that will accept the integrity of the photograph.
Paul Virilio
[Writer and theorist, b. 1932, Paris, lives in La Rochelle, France.]
Digital messages and images matter less than their instantaneous delivery; the “shock effect” always wins out over the consideration of the informational content.
Nora Ephron
[Writer, b. 1941, New York, d. 2012, New York.]
I recognize that printing pictures of corpses raises all sorts of problems about taste and titillation and sensationalism; the fact is, however, that people die. Death happens to be one of life’s main events. And it is irresponsible and more than that, inaccurate, for newspapers to fail to show it.
Theodor Adorno
[Writer, b. 1903, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1969, Visp, Switzerland.]
The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
The kind of photography I did is gone. It’s old. There’s no point in it anymore for me, and I get no satisfaction from trying to do it. There are too many pictures now. It’s overwhelming. A flood of images that passes by, and says, “Why should we remember anything?” There is too much to remember now, too much to take in.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The final reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to use up—and therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be ransacked; they are precisely what is at hand wherever the camera falls. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust.
Stan Brakhage
[Filmmaker, b. 1933, Kansas City, Missouri, d. 2003, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.]
I was struggling against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of “picture”—by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don’t even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that.
