Top 22 Quotes About Documentary Photography
#1. I may be wrong, but the essential 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, and Marx.
Aaron Siskind
#2. My photography changed from being more documentary-like to arranging things more, and that came into being partly because I started doing music videos, and I incorporated some things from the music videos into my photography again, by arranging things more.
Anton Corbijn
#3. No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.
Chuck Palahniuk
#4. I am sick of war. Every woman of my generation is sick of war. Fifty years of war. Wars rumored, wars beginning, wars fought, wars ending, wars paid for, wars endured.
Josephine Winslow Johnson
#6. That which is good for the society is not necessarily good for the individual. That which is good for the individual is good for the society.
Richard Diaz
#7. 'America 24/7' will be a landmark series in documentary photography and the watershed event of the new digital photography age.
Rick Smolan
#9. What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman.
Walker Evans
#10. Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet ... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.
Allan Sekula
#11. When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckett
as told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett
Samuel Beckett
#12. The best thing about series TV is that everyone you work with is hand-picked, as compared to working on a film.
Denis Leary
#13. I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.
Joan Fontcuberta
#14. I have tried to bring about better communication between people. I believe that humanitarian photography is like economics. Economy is a kind of sociology, as is documentary photography.
Sebastiao Salgado
#15. I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.
W. Eugene Smith
#16. I don't see how a woman in documentary photography could have children. I think it's a very difficult thing to do to raise a family, and I have enormous respect for people who do it. I'd hate to do something like that and not be good at it.
Mary Ellen Mark
#17. Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character.
Hedi Slimane
#18. [Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)
Pierre Mac Orlan
#19. Step up and move ahead, life is all about moving on and traveling all along like a bird.
Santosh Kalwar
#20. Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.
Vilem Flusser
#21. I have always felt that a lot of the most interesting work, not just mine but other people's, falls into [the] nether area, somewhere between the worlds of documentary and photojournalism (two very vague words) and the world of art. I think a lot of street photography falls into this nether area.
Alex Webb
#22. To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn't think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.
Aaron Siskind
