Roger Ballen
[Photographer, b. 1950, New York, lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.]
It is my belief that the most challenging photographs are those that create a tension between what we refer to as the real and the imaginative.
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
The flow of reality has contours and dimensions much like the flow of a river. The characteristics of the current depend on the channel, whether it is a product of history or geology. Documentary photography has similar properties. The images I create are a confluence of what is in front of me and what is inside of me. They are objective and subjective at the same time, and they must be seen that way by the viewer in order to be convincing.
Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
I want to bring my pictures to the ideal of music. Like music, it means everything, it says everything, but it is objective.
Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
…my role as a photographer is never that of an author, a chronicler, or a director; my role should be indistinguishable from those I photograph.
Stephen Shore
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in New York.]
There’s something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically... I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.
Arthur Tress
[Photographer, b. 1940, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Cambria, California.]
In my old age I no longer see the difference between documentary and staged.
(2012, age 71)
Abelardo Morell
[b. 1948, Havana, Cuba, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]
It’s important to me to have what I photograph undergo a certain transformation—to become a thing different from what we are used to, to be another version of itself.
Martine Franck
[Photographer, b. 1938, Antwerp, Belgium, d. 2012, Paris.]
A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn’t the truth either. It’s more like a fleeting, subjective impression.
