Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
I’m like an old junkie, in a way. You don’t stick syringes in your arm—you go straight for the most important part of your body, the brain. You are destroying it the moment you go to your first war.
Sheila Metzner
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
Photographers are often transformed by their own work. They should look at themselves every now and again to make sure they haven't become some kind of beast.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
Virtually the whole of society believes in what they believe not by direct experience but by what they’ve been told. We photographers are in this exalted, privileged position of actually going out to find out for ourselves, and that’s why we’re so dangerous. Because we were there. We saw what happened.
Donald Trump (Drumpf)
[Businessman, liar, huckster, politician, b. 1946, New York, lives in Washington, D.C..]
Be very careful, because in your hotel rooms and no matter where you go, you’re gonna probably have cameras.
(Advice, offered while denying the existence of photo documents of him performing outer edge sexual practices in a Russian hotel room.)
Jorge Luis Borges
[Writer, poet, and librarian, b. 1899, Buenos Aires, Argentina, d. 1986, Geneva, Switzerland.]
Islam asserts that on the unappealable Day of Judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
...people have always known, at least since Moses denounced the Golden Calf, that images were dangerous, that they can captivate the onlooker and steal the soul.
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
The richness of our contemporary visual world must be seen as a danger. It is an overwhelming and oppressive world. A world that manifests itself fundamentally through the image is only a few steps from totalitarian manipulation.
Stephen Colbert
[Satirist and television host, b. 1964, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
Cameras are dangerous. With no waiting period or background check, any whack-job could just stroll into a Wal-Mart and walk out with a semi-automatic. Now, for years I’ve been pressing for stricter regulations on cameras, especially around our elected officials. Too many political lives have been cut short by some crazed shooter.
