Dennis Hopper
[Actor, artist, and photographer, b. 1936, Dodge City, Kansas, d. 2010, Venice, California.]
You know, the history of California art doesn’t start until about 1961, and that’s when these photographs start. I mean, we have no history out here.
Eddie Adams
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, d. 2004, New York.]
How do you know you wouldn’t have pulled the trigger yourself?
(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.)
George Santayana
[Philosopher and writer, b. 1863, Madrid, Spain, d. 1952, Rome, Italy.]
The eye only has one retina, the brain a limited capacity for storage; but the camera can receive any number of plates, and the new need never blur or crowd out the old. Here is a new and accurate visual memory, a perfect record of what the brain must necessarily forget or confuse.
(1912)
Ansel Adams
[Photographer, b. 1902, San Francisco, d. 1984, Carmel, California.]
What you’ve got are not photographers. They’re a bunch of sociologists with cameras.
(To Roy Stryker, head of the photographers of the Farm Security Administration)
James Casebere
[Photographer, b. 1953, Lansing, Michigan, lives in New York.]
The novels by Latin American magical realists showed how history is rewritten by each successive military dictatorship. I look at photography the same way: as a fiction, as representative of a particular point of view.
William Henry Jackson
[Photographer, b. 1843, Keesville, New York, d. 1942, New York.]
[The building of the transcontinental railway] was something truly earth-shaking and, whether or not there had been a dime in it for me, sooner or later I would have been out on the grade with my cameras.
Alexander Gardner
[Photographer, b. 1821, Paisley, Scotland, d. 1882, Washington, D.C.]
[My work] is designed to speak for itself. as mementos of the fearful struggle through which the country has just passed, it is confidently hoped that it will possess an enduring interest.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.
