Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]

 I had myself echoed [Peter Henry] Emerson’s view that photography was not an art form, but I had done so without the slightest regret… It is something better than art! It rules out subjectivity, the artist’s arbitrariness; through photography it is at last possible to attain divine, total objectivity. 

W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]

 The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective. 

Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]

 Photography is very subjective. Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie. 

Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]

 ... it is not a factual photograph per se. The documentary photograph carries with it another thing, a quality in the subject that the artist responds to. It is a photograph which carries the full meaning of the episode or the circumstance or the situation that can only be revealed—because you can’t really recapture it—by this other quality. There is no real warfare between the artist and the documentary photographer. He has to be both. 

Richard Misrach
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in San Francisco.]

 I love the fact that a photograph is always open to interpretation—there is no fixed meaning. 

W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]

 Up to and including the instant of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way. 

Eikoh Hosoe
[Photographer, b. 1933, Yonezawa, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]

 To me, a photograph is both a record and a testimony, mirror and window... in which inside and outside are as one, ever-changing... The camera is generally assumed to be unable to depict that which is not visible to the eye. And yet the photographer who wields it well can depict what lies unseen in his memory. 

William Klein
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, lives in Paris.]

 Anybody who pretends to be objective isn’t realistic. 
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