Alfred Lord Tennyson
[Poet, b. 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire, England, d. 1892, Aldwort, England.]
I can’t be anonymous by reason of your confounded photographs.
(To Julia Margaret Cameron)
Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.
Li Zhensheng
[Photographer, b. 1940, Dalian, China, lives in Beijing.]
No one asked me to take close-ups of the bodies, but that’s what I did. I had to get very close, so close I could smell the fishy smell of blood and brains. (On his photographs of Red Guard executing prisoners in Harbin, China during the Cultural Revolution.)
Nhem En
[Photographer, b. 1961, Kampong Leng, Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia, lives in Cambodia.]
My only job was to photograph them, and it was someone else who tortured and killed these people. As a photographer, I had no right to beat, torture, or kill prisoners. I could not touch them.
(En, official photographer at Khmer Rouge torture center Tuol Sleng, estimates he took photographs of 10,000 people arriving at the center. Eight survived.)
Mariana Yampolsky
[Photographer, b. 1925, Chicago, d. 2002, Mexico City.]
If I have to define my photography, I’d say my studio is the street.
Ellen von Unwerth
[Photographer, b. 1954, Frankfurt, Germany, lives in New York.]
I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
[Writer, b. 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India, d. 1950, London.]
It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Oglivy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence... Comrade Oglivy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
Ralph Gibson
[Photographer, b. 1939, Los Angeles, California, lives in New York.]
I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.