W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
I always fought hard against packaging a story so that all things seem to come to and end at the end of the story. I always wanted to leave it so that there is a tomorrow.
Richard Misrach
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in San Francisco.]
In spite of recent trends towards fabricating photographic narratives, I find, more than ever, traditional photographic capture—the “discovery” of found narratives—deeply compelling.
Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
... I wanted to be a storyteller, tell a story. Which I hate to even admit to now, because I hate photojournalism so badly.
Paolo Pellegrin
[Photographer, b. 1964, Rome, lives in Paris.]
I’m more interested in a photography that is “unfinished”—a photography that is suggestive and can trigger a conversation or dialogue. There are pictures that are closed, finished, to which there is no way in.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
Every photo, every “once” in time is also the beginning of a story “once upon a time.” Every photo is the first frame of a movie.
Eudora Welty
[Writer, b. 1909, Jackson, Mississippi, d. 2001, Jackson.]
I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer’s truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.
Hilla Becher
[Photographer, b. 1934, Potsdam, d. 2015, Düsseldorf.]
One just has to select the right objects and fit them into the picture precisely, then they tell their own story all by themselves.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
Every photographic image is a sign, above all, of someone’s investment in the sending of a message.
