Bert Hardy
[Photographer, b. 1913, London, d. 1995, Oxted, England.]
Everywhere I look and most of the time I look, I see photographs.
Although I do not usually like taking pictures of corpses, I controlled my feelings of rage for long enough to take some; without such evidence, no one would believe that anything like this had ever happened. (On photographing the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 19, 1945)
I made a point of carrying a contact print of one of the most horrifying of my photographs around with me to show to Germans who didn’t believe that such things had really happened. (On the Nazi concentration camps)
The ideal picture tells something of the essence of life. It sums up emotion, it holds the feeling of movement thereby implying the continuity of life. It shows some aspect of humanity, the way that the person who looks at the picture will at once recognize as startlingly true.