Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
You can photograph anything now.
Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
There are two kinds of photographers: those who compose pictures and those who take them. The former work in studios. For the latter, the studio is the world... For them, the ordinary doesn’t exist: every thing in life is a source of nourishment.
Barbara DeGenevieve
[Photographer, artist, and curator, b. 1947, d. 2014, Chicago, Illinois.]
You can assume all photo and video is constructed as a fiction controlled by the person holding the camera and the person who is editing...
Elliott Erwitt
[Photographer, b. 1928, Paris, France, lives in New York.]
You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.
Ken Domon
[Photographer, b. 1909, Sakata, Japan, d. 1990, Tokyo.]
The absolutely pure snapshot, absolutely unstaged.
(Dictum)
Roy Stryker
[Economist, photographer, and administrator, b. 1893, Great Bend, Kansas, d. 1975, Grand Junction, Colorado.]
By the precision of their instrument, by the very mechanical limitations of shutter, lens, and film, they are invested with credibility; simple honesty will render to their pictures the dignity of fact; feeling and insight will give their fraction of a second’s exposure the integrity of truth. And truth, universal and applicable as a measuring stick to life, is the objective of the documentary attitude.
Robert Capa (Endre Ern? Friedmann)
[Photographer, b. 1913, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1954, Thai Binh, Vietnam.]
The [concentration camps] were swarming with photographers and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. Now, for a short day, everyone will see what happened to those poor devils in those camps; tomorrow, very few will care what happens to them in the future.
Ansel Adams
[Photographer, b. 1902, San Francisco, d. 1984, Carmel, California.]
One danger confronts the development of the photo-document—the danger of it becoming a tool of obvious propaganda. All art is delicate propaganda of some sort, but I do not feel that direct propaganda succeeds except in the injury to the aesthetic potentials.
