Bob Richardson
[Photographer, b. 1928, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2005, New York.]
I wanted to put reality in my photographs. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. That’s what was happening. And I was going to help make it happen. Boy, they did not want that in America.
Donald Rumsfeld
[Bureaucrat, U.S. Secretary of Defense, b. 1932, Chicago, lives in St. Michaels, Maryland.]
...people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.
(On photographs from Abu Ghraib prison.)
Martin Parr
[Photographer, b. 1952, Epson, Surrey, England, lives in Bristol and London, England.]
I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, “What relationship has it with what’s going on?” I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia.
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)
[Writer, photographer, mathematician, and logician, b. 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, England, d. 1898, Guildford, Surrey, England.]
I wish I dared dispense with all costume. Naked children are so perfectly pure and lovely; but Mrs. Grundy would be furious—it would never do.
Luc Sante
[Writer, b. 1954, Verviers, Belgium, lives in Ulster County, New York.]
Right now [Robert Mapplethorpe’s] sex pictures appear to present mainstream culture with an unscalable wall. Some of them will not be assimilable for a long time, but probably fewer will resist assimilation than anyone thinks at the moment.
(1995)
J.G. Ballard
[Writer, b. 1930, Shanghai, d. 2009, Shepperton, England.]
Nudity in photography, whether involving adults or children, is a subject sinking under a freight of political and moral disapproval it could never hope to support, and this is not the place for me to get out the bilge pump. I will only say that critics who tremble so fiercely at the thought of the voyeuristic male gaze miss the point that distance generates mystery and enchantment, and expresses the awe with which the male imagination regards all women.
Otto Wöhler
[Military leader, b. 1894, Burgwedel, Germany, d. 1987, Burgwedel.]
No photographs will be made of such abominable excesses and no report of them will be given in letters home. The production and the distribution of such photographs and reports on such incidents are looked upon as undermining the decency and discipline in the armed forces and will be severely punished. All existing photographs and reports on such excesses are to be confiscated together with the negatives and are to be sent to the Ic counterintelligence officer of the army giving the name of the producer or distributor.
(July 1941 order to German 11th Army troops operating on the eastern front with holocaust killing squad Einsatzgruppe D, 1941)
Paul Outerbridge
[Photographer, b. 1896, New York, d. 1958, Laguna Beach, California.]
The business of the state trying to legislate modesty is relatively both an infantile and ridiculous procedure. Of course, it is true that the more things are secreted the more intriguing they become, because it is always the forbidden that has the strongest appeal. Nudity is a state of fact—lewdity a state of mind.
