Richard Nixon
[Politician, b. 1913, Yorba Linda, California, d. 1994, New York.]
I’m wondering if that was fixed.
(Nixon doubting the veracity of Nick Ut’s photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing the village of Trang Bang, Vietnam after it was napalm bombed in 1972; from the White House tapes.) 
Antonin Kratochvil
[Photographer, b. 1947, Lovisice, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
I was repelled by the sleazy reality of the totalitarian countries: politicians were shameless. There were corruption, pollution, shoddy goods, long lines, and suicide everywhere, but the leaders kept boasting about their great achievements and bright tomorrows. I saw all this and tried to show it in my pictures as simply and straightforwardly as I could. All I wanted to do was record how all these poor people adapted to lies and suffering, how they got used to it, how, in fact they were bound to miss it when it was over.
Sergei Tretyakov
[Writer, critic, and artist, b. 1892, Guldiga, Russia (now Kuldigas, Latvia), d. 1939, Moscow.]
If the photograph, under the influence of the text (or caption), expresses not simply the fact which it shows, but also the social tendency expressed by the fact, then this is already a photomontage.
Langston Hughes
[Writer, b. 1902, Joplin, Missouri, d. 1967, New York.]
Anyday, one can walk down the street in a big city and see a thousand people. Any photographer can photograph these people—but very few photographers can make their prints not only reproductions of the people taken, but a comment upon them—or more, a comment upon their lives—or more still, a comment upon the social order that creates these lives.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photography can lead us astray, we can be tricked by ocular proof. And photography—and I believe this is the right verb—can entice us into error.
Fred Ritchin
[Critic and writer, b. 1952, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
And the wars? Can our photographs do anything at all? (Or do we turn it all into image so that it will bother us less?)
Danny Lyon
[Photographer, b. 1942, New York, lives in Ulster County, New York.]
I feel totally responsible for what I see. I feel totally responsible for what I photograph.
Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]
Revolution in the photographic field consists in photographing in such a way that photography will have enough strength not just to rival painting, but also to point out to everyone a new and modern way of discovering the world of science, of technology and everyday life.
