Roy DeCarava
[Photographer, b. 1919, New York, d. 2009, Brooklyn, New York.]
... I want to show the strength, the wisdom, the dignity of the Negro people. Not the famous and well known, but the unknown and unnamed, thus revealing the roots from which spring the greatness of all human beings... I do not want a documentary or sociological statement, I want a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret.
Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
I may be wrong, but the essentially illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se in our best nature photography is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, Marx. The interior drama is the meaning of the exterior event. And each man is an essence and a symbol.
Donna Ferrato
[Photographer, b. 1949, Waltham, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]
What makes me really happy is to get deep into the muck and juicy good stuff of people’s lives.
Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]
Actually, you know, we’ve learned how to photograph poor people. It might be really more interesting now, it certainly would be more difficult, to see if we can learn how to photograph affluence.
Marshall McLuhan
[Writer and theorist, b. 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, d. 1980, Toronto, Canada.]
[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that “the camera cannot lie” is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.
Bert Hardy
[Photographer, b. 1913, London, d. 1995, Oxted, England.]
The ideal picture tells something of the essence of life. It sums up emotion, it holds the feeling of movement thereby implying the continuity of life. It shows some aspect of humanity, the way that the person who looks at the picture will at once recognize as startlingly true.
Barbara Morgan
[Photographer, b. 1900, Buffalo, Kansas, d. 1992, North Tarrytown, New York.]
From pre-historic time, the human psyche has found inspiration in art expression, from cave paintings then—to film and photography now.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
[Anthropologist, b. 1908, Brussels, Belgium, d. 2009, Paris.]
With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.
