Donna Ferrato
[Photographer, b. 1949, Waltham, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]

 Not for me the uninvolved wanderer with a camera—some invisible alien, coldly holding a tin box without a heart. My camera has feelings. 

Beat Streuli
[Photographer and visual artist, b. 1957, Altdorf, Switzerland, lives in Zurich and Brussels.]

 ...I don’t see myself as a documentary photographer. I am more drawn to the image itself, rather than to the description of a scene. And, anyway, every image only halfway represents reality, whereas the other half is rather, more or less, fulfilling our imagination. 

Shelby Lee Adams
[Photographer, b. 1950, Hazard, Kentucky, lives in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]

 I photograph people who are in pain, and I don’t want to make that romantic and ideal when they’re suffering. I photograph them looking at the camera in a very straightforward way and present their humanity to you in as straightforward a way as possible… if we don’t explore the dark side of our own selves and our own culture, then we’re not growing. 

Bill Eppridge
[Photographer, b. 1938, Buenos Aires, d. 2013, Danbury, Connecticut.]

 There in front of me was the Senator on the floor being held by the busboy. There was nobody else around, and I made my first frame, and I forgot to focus the camera. The second frame was a little more in focus… then just for a second, while everything was open, the busboy looked up, and he had this look in his eye. I made that picture, and then suddenly the whole situation closed in again. And it became bedlam.(On the 1968 shooting of U.S. presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy.) 

Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]

 I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn’t planned; it was realism. 

William Albert Allard
[Photojournalist, b. 1937, Minneapolis, Minnesota, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.]

 I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges. 

Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]

 I saw a man lying on the steps of a church on Lex Ave under a sign saying Open for Meditation and Prayer with his fly open and his penis out. I couldn’t ask him to sign a release. Could you? (To her magazine editor) 

Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]

 Who needs great pictures when somebody’s dying and he’s only five years old? (On his own photographs of starvation in Biafra) 
quotes 257-264 of 270
first page previous page page 33 of 34 next page last page
display quotes