Horst Faas
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, Berlin, Germany, d. 2012, Munich, Germany.]
I think we have another Pulitzer here.
(On his his first viewing of Nick Ut’s photograph of Kim Phuc fleeing the village of Trang Bang, Vietnam after it was napalm bombed in 1972.) 
Charles Baudelaire
[Writer, b. 1821, Paris, d. 1867, Paris.]
This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy.
Shirin Neshat
[Artist, photographer, and filmmaker, b. 1957, Qazvin, Iran, lives in New York.]
Beautiful woman wrapped in chadors, with huge machine guns in their hands. Brilliant, shocking, amazingly contradictory images. They compelled me to deeply investigate these ideas.
Jacob Riis
[Photographer and reformer, b. 1849, Denmark, d. 1914, Barre, Massachusetts.]
It was not too much to say that our party carried terror wherever it went. The flashlight of those days was carried in cartridges fired from a revolver. The spectacle of half a dozen strange men invading a house in the midnight hour armed with big pistols which they shot off recklessly was hardly reassuring, however sugary our speech, and it was not to be wonder at if the tenants bolted through windows and down fire-escapes wherever we went.
(1918)
Michael Ondaatje
[Writer, b. 1943, Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), lives in Toronto, Canada.]
You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of.
(On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
[Philosopher, b. 1889, Vienna, Austria, d. 1951, Cambridge, England.]
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat itself to us inexorably.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.
William Klein
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, lives in Paris.]
I have always done the opposite of what I was trained to do... Having little technical background, I became a photographer. Adopting a machine, I do my utmost to make it malfunction. For me, to make a photograph is to make an anti-photograph.
