William Albert Allard
[Photojournalist, b. 1937, Minneapolis, Minnesota, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.]
What is right? Simply put, it is any assignment in which the photographer has a significant spiritual stake... spiritually driven work constitutes the core of a photographer’s contribution to culture.
Robert Coles
[Writer and psychiatrist, b. 1929, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Concord, Massachusetts.]
Doing documentary work is a journey, and is a little more, too, a passage across boundaries (disciplines, occupational constraints, definitions, conventions all too influentially closed for traffic), a passage that can become a quest, even a pilgrimage, a movement toward the sacred truth enshrined not only on tablets of stone, but in the living hearts of those others whom we can hear, see, and get to understand. Thereby we hope to be confirmed in our own humanity—the creature on this earth whose very nature it is to make just that kind of connection with others during the brief stay we are permitted here.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The failure of photography seems to me to be flagrant in this connection: to reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing; ... [it] only make[s] the gestures of man look eternal the better to defuse them.
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.
Wynn Bullock
[Photographer, b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1975, Monterey, California.]
My thinking has been deeply affected by the belief that all things are some form of radiant energy. Light is perhaps the most profound truth in the universe.
