Simon Norfolk
[Photographer, b. 1963, Lagos, Nigeria, lives in Brighton, England.]
[My] pictures are about memory and forgetfulness. The evidence is dissolving. Bones crumble; human ash returns to soil; teeth, sandals, hair, bullets, axes disperse into atoms and molecules. Footprints in the snow will be erased by the next storm. The evidence of evil, like the evidence of good, obeys the universal laws of entropy. Heat cools, matter disintegrates, memories fade. If we let them.
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior which has existed throughout history by means of photography? The proportions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance. Yet, that very idea has motivated me.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.
(On seeing photographs of the Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps.)
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
Why are photographs so good at making us
see cruelty? Partly, I think, because photographs bring home to us the reality of physical suffering with a literalness and an irrefutability that neither literature nor painting can claim.
Larry Burrows
[Photographer, b. 1926, London, d. 1971, Laos.]
Sorry if my captioning is not up to standard but with all that sniper fire around I didn’t dare wave a white notebook.
Richard Nixon
[Politician, b. 1913, Yorba Linda, California, d. 1994, New York.]
I’m wondering if that was fixed.
(Nixon doubting the veracity of Nick Ut’s photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing the village of Trang Bang, Vietnam after it was napalm bombed in 1972; from the White House tapes.)
Horst Faas
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, Berlin, Germany, d. 2012, Munich, Germany.]
I try to express with the camera what the story is, to get to the heart of the story with picture. In battle I look at things first in terms of people, second in terms of strategies or casualties... To tell a story, you don’t photograph one hundred dead civilians to prove there were one hundred dead civilians. You photograph one dead civilian with an expression on his face that says, “This is what it’s like if you’re a dead civilian in Vietnam.”
To get the best picture of a captured prisoner, you have to get him just as he is captured. The expression he wears then is lost forever... The human mechanism is remarkably recuperative. A half hour later, the expressions are gone, the faces have changed. The mother with the dead baby in her arms does not look griefstruck anymore, no matter what she feels.
