Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.
Robert Capa (Endre Ern? Friedmann)
[Photographer, b. 1913, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1954, Thai Binh, Vietnam.]
The [concentration camps] were swarming with photographers and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. Now, for a short day, everyone will see what happened to those poor devils in those camps; tomorrow, very few will care what happens to them in the future.
Clarence John Laughlin
[Photographer, b. 1905, Lake Charles, Louisiana, d. 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana.]
Let us see as steadily and completely as possible the realities of our age: the wasted lives, the scattered and misused resources (human and material), the steel magic of the misdirected machinery, the mad clockwork tragedy of it all.
Sebastião Salgado
[Photographer, b. 1944, Aimores, Minas Gerias, Brazil, lives in Paris and Brazil.]
I’m not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it’s not an object, I work in history, I’m a storyteller.
Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]
The first century of photography was all about making a decent picture. After that, it was mostly about making something look decent or indecent
in a picture.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
Working in the inexhaustible natural pageant before me, I came to wonder if the artist who commands the landscape might in fact hold the keys to the secrets of the human heart: place, personal history, and metaphor.
Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
The image wanders ghostlike through the present. Ghostly apparitions occur only in places where a terrible deed has been committed.
Arnold Genthe
[Photographer, b. 1869, Berlin, Germany, d. 1942, New York.]
Of the pictures I had made during the fire, there are several, I believe, that will be of lasting interest. There is particularly the one scene that I recorded the morning of the first day of the fire which shows, in a pictorially effective composition, the results of the earthquake, the beginning of the fire and the attitude of the people. On the right is a house, the front of which had collapsed into the street. The occupants are sitting on chairs calmly watching the approach of the fire. Groups of people are standing in the street, motionless, gazing at the clouds of smoke. When the fire crept up close, they would just move up a block. It is hard to believe that such a scene actually occurred in the way the photograph represents it. Several people upon seeing it have exclaimed, “Oh, is that a still from a Cecil De Mille picture?” To which the answer has been, “No, the director of this scene was the Lord himself.”
(On photographing the San Francisco earthquake of 1906)
