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.)
Alfred Eisenstaedt
[Photographer, b. 1898, Dirschau, West Prussia (now Tczew, Poland), d. 1995, New York.]
When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.
Umberto Eco
[Writer, semiotician, and philosopher, b. 1932, Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy, d. 2016, Milan.]
The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.
Harold Evans
[Writer and editor, b. 1928, Manchester, England, lives in New York.]
People were murdered for the camera; and some photographers and a television camera crew departed without taking a picture in the hope that in the absence of cameramen acts might not be committed. Others felt that the mob was beyond appeal to mercy. They stayed and won Pulitzer Prizes. Were they right?
T.S. Elliot
[Poet and critic, b. 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1965, London.]
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Elliott Erwitt
[Photographer, b. 1928, Paris, France, lives in New York.]
After following the crowd for a while, I’d then go 180 degrees in the exact opposite direction. It always worked for me, but then again, I’m very lucky.
Albert Einstein
[Scientist, b. 1879, Ulm, Württemberg, Germany, d. 1955, Princeton, New Jersey.]
I dislike every photograph taken of me. However, this one I dislike a little bit less.
(On the portrait by Philippe Halsman, who he excluded from his normal characterization of photographers as Lichtaffen—“Light monkeys.”)
Paul Éluard
[Writer, b. 1895, Sant-Denis, France, d. 1952, Charenton-le-Pont, France.]
Seeing is understanding, judging, transforming, imagining, forgetting and being forgotten, being or disappearing.