Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
The reporter is someone in a trench coat with a rakishly upturned collar, who runs after events, wants to capture facts, narrates, reports on so-called reality. To be honest, I’m not too interested in facts. My issues are more of an artistic nature. These are rather more the problems of the painter. I’m a painter who was too impatient to paint, and therefore became a photographer.
Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
Reportage, or the spontaneous, fleeting aspect of the photographic image, appear simultaneously with the pictorial, tableau-like aspect at the origins of photography; its traces can be seen in the blurred elements of Daguerre’s first scenes. Reportage evolves in the pursuit of the blurred parts of the pictures.
Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
I belong to a bygone era when magazines sent you out to do a thorough report. It was a more traditional kind of photography reflecting a world that didn’t want images of it to be perfect. We don’t look at the truth anymore; instead, we look at whatever reassures us.
Yukio Mishima
[Writer, b. 1925, Tokyo, d. 1970, Tokyo.]
The images which the [press] photographer has filtered from reality, whether particular events or the anguish of human reactions to them, already bear a stamp of authenticity which the photographer is powerless to alter by one jot or tittle; the meaning of the objects, by a process of purification, itself becomes the theme of the work.
Martin Parr
[Photographer, b. 1952, Epson, Surrey, England, lives in Bristol and London, England.]
I see things going on before my eyes and I photograph them as they are, without trying to change them. I don’t warn people beforehand. That’s why I’m a chronicler. I speak about us and I speak about myself.
David Burnett
[Photojournalist, b. 1946, Salt Lake City, Utah, lives in Arlington, Virginia.]
When you’ve lived through the golden age of photojournalism, there’s no point in being nostalgic.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
No sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer.
