Philip Larkin
[Poet and writer, b. 1922, Coventry, England, d. 1985, London.]
But o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! that records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
Today, the photographer is sent off to illustrate the preconceptions, usually misconceptions, of the desk-bound editor—an editor biased not by any knowledge of the subject but by the pressure to conform to the standard view ordained by the powers that be. Any deviation from the ‘party line’ is rejected. We are probably the last generation that will accept the integrity of the photograph. Nhem En
[Photographer, b. 1961, Kampong Leng, Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia, lives in Cambodia.]
It was difficult to take pictures of the newcomers who were blindfolded and tied up when they were leaving the truck. Sometimes they arrived in chains. Sometimes we got reprimanded; for example, if we took a picture of A and the photo was not good and A was already killed, then we were charged as the enemy. (En, official photographer at Khmer Rouge torture center Tuol Sleng, estimates he took photographs of 10,000 people arriving at the center. Eight survived.) Paul Strand
[Photographer, b. 1890, New York, d. 1976, Oregeval, France.]
The days slip by within this magical repetition of sun and storm and cold starlit nights... so, that if one had not made a few photographs... they might be a dreamlike mirage.
(From Taos, 1931, to Alfred Stieglitz) John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.? Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
In an initial period, photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs.