Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
I want my children and my children’s children to be able to look at my pictures and know what my world was like. Even if it only helps a little bit toward this understanding, then I’ve done my job and done it well.
Alfredo Jarr
[Artist, b. 1956, Santiago, Chile, lives in New York.]
Images have an advanced religion; they bury history.
Eddie Adams
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, d. 2004, New York.]
I saw a man walk into my camera viewfinder from the left. He took a pistol out of his holster and raised it. I had no idea he would shoot. It was common to hold a pistol to the head of prisoners during questioning. So I prepared to make that picture—the threat, the interrogation. But it didn’t happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC’s head and shot him in the temple. I made a picture at the same time.
(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.)
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
It wasn’t my fault if in Sabra and Shatila the light was almost biblical, if what happened in front of my eyes was like a scene out of Goya.
Rondal Partridge
[Photographer, b. 1917, San Francisco, d. 2015, Berkeley, California.]
I have an abiding faith in the fact that time will change the value of photographs. What you see today may be so familiar to everyone that they don’t immediately appreciate or value it.
August Sander
[Photographer, b. 1876, Herdorf, Germany, d. 1964, Cologne.]
By sight and observation and thought, with the help of the camera, and the addition of the date of the year, we can hold fast the history of the world.
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
[Writer, b. 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India, d. 1950, London.]
Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
Roman Vishniac
[Photographer, b. 1897, Pavlovsk, Russia, d. 1990, New York.]
I was living in Germany in the thirties, and I knew that Hitler had made it his mission to exterminate all Jews, especially the children and the women who could bear children in the future. I was unable to save my people, only their memory.
