David Bailey
[Photographer, b. 1938, London, lives in London.]
They’re photographs of cocks and vaginas. They’re kind of medical, done absolutely close-up with no pretensions to lighting or anything. I just thought it’s something everybody’s got but you never see them in photographs. And, you’d be surprised at the personality of them; you can’t believe that every one is different.
Nora Ephron
[Writer, b. 1941, New York, d. 2012, New York.]
That [photographs] disturb readers is exactly as it should be: that’s why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
Someone may have been killed by the wayside and his body is rotting away and nobody cares that it was a human being and it was a person—a living person. I care, and I’m going to photograph it—as horrible as it looks, I’m going to photograph it.
Paolo Gasparini
[Photographer, b. 1934, Gorizia, Italy, lives in Caracas, Venezuela.]
I was interested in living and participating in the revolutionary movement, and naturally I wanted to get it down on black and white film.
Lewis Hine
[Photographer, writer, and reformer, b. 1874, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, d. 1940, New York.]
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug a camera.
Umberto Eco
[Writer, semiotician, and philosopher, b. 1932, Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy, d. 2016, Milan.]
We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.
Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
Women held bleached-out photographs in the air to the new arrivals. “Do you know him? Have you seen my son?” They called out the names of their men. Children with pictures of fathers they had never seen compared the photographs with the faces of the arrivals. It was almost too much. I staggered home as if in a trance.
(On photographing the return of WWII prisoners from the camps in eastern Europe.)
Chris Burden
[Artist, b. 1946, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 2015, Los Angeles.]
I was very careful not to use film or video to record most of the performances, because I think most people, then, were not sophisticated enough to look at a video or film and necessarily understand that they were not seeing the real thing, so there was a built-in misunderstanding and you could go away from the film with a misrepresentation. Still photographs have been around for longer so people understand that they’re only a symbol of what was there, they are more easily able to separate the stills from the reality of the actual event and see them only as symbols or indicators of what went on.
