Documentary Photography Quotes

I don't know that there were any rules for documentary photography. As a matter of fact, I don't think the term was even very precise. So as far as I'm concerned, the kind of photography I did in the FSA was the kind of photography I still do today, because it is based on passionate concern for the human condition. That is the basis of all the work that I do. ~ Jack Delano

Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs. ~ Sally Mann

Many people in this world do jobs that are dangerous and where their life is at risk and they feel that there is some kind of value to their job I guess that's how I feel about what I do. There is a social function to documentary photography that is very important and it requires people to take risks. ~ James Nachtwey

Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography's limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating. ~ Taryn Simon

I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose. ~ W. Eugene Smith

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

'America 24/7' will be a landmark series in documentary photography and the watershed event of the new digital photography age. ~ Rick Smolan

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

I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence. ~ Young-Ha Kim

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times - the pulse of today. ~ Berenice Abbott

Don' t focus on NEW - focus on authent ic. Being or iginal isn' t being new - i t 's being
you. ~ Scott Bourne

I had no agent, and I was getting approached by so many people that I tried to escape for a while because I couldn't believe that world. Photography is not an industry, and suddenly an industry came to me, so I sort of had to accept it in the end and get an agent. ~ Anton Corbijn

A friend of mine is trying to do a documentary where he brings Jewish and Arab comedians to occupied territories in Israel. He wants to do shows as a way of finding some comedic common denominator. When he proposed the idea to one of the officials at the Jenin refuge camp, the guy just stared at him and said, "This is not a joke to us. We don't think that laughing is the answer." ~ Harold Ramis

I want to communicate through my music. If you want to know Geri Halliwell listen to my album: it tells you more about me than a documentary ever could. ~ Geri Halliwell

I believe in art the way other people believe in god. I say that because books and paintings and music and photography gave me an alternate world to inhabit when the one I was born into was a dead zone. I say it because if you, even inside whatever terror itches your skin, pick up a pen or a paintbrush, a camera or clay or a guitar, you already have what you are afraid to choose. Volition. It was already in you. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

You can't tell by looking at a film-clip whether it is a drama or a documentary without knowing how it was produced. ~ Errol Morris

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. ~ Ansel Adams

I don't write as many songs as I used to. But, I find myself writing for social media more - times have changed. And I love photography, so a lot of my creative energy gets caught up that way. ~ Arlo Guthrie

I like there to be a joke in practically every photo I take. Nobody has the right to make photography boring. ~ Norman Parkinson

Photographs don't discriminate between the living and the dead. In the fragments of time and shards of light that compose them, everyone is equal. Now you see us; now you don't. It doesn't matter whether you look through a camera lens and press the shutter. It doesn't even matter whether you open your eyes or close them. The pictures are always there. And so are the people in them. ~ Robert Goddard

You are either born to be a photographer or not. The art of photography is not something you can learn in the classroom or by watching someone do it. ~ Nobuyoshi Araki

The most important lesson in photography is learning to photograph what you love. ~ Tony Northrup

Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment." ~ John Loengard

Ridiculous. You guys are going to have the most boring documentary on earth," I said and stormed inside.
"Could you walk in the building again, but slower and don't slam the door," Hugo called after me. ~ Heather O'Neill

Photographers are history makers,
Every picture is a moment which gone forever
and can't re shoot. ~ Biju Karakkonam, Nature And Wildlife Photographer

Photography - the new, rapid, concrete reflector of the world - should surely undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to develop people's capacity to see from all sides. (1928) ~ Alexander Rodchenko

Photography transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object: in order to take the first portraits the subject had to assume long poses under a glass roof in bright sunlight; to become an object made one suffer as much as surgical operation; then a device was invented, a kind of prosthesis invisible to the lens, which supported and maintained the body in its passage to immobility: this headrest was the pedestal of the statue I would become, the corset of my imaginary essence. ~ Roland Barthes

I love photography, and I love the art of photography. ~ Helen Mirren

It never seemed important to me that my photos be published. It's important that I take them. There were periods where I didn't have money, and I would imagine that someone would come to me and say: 'Here is money, you can go do your photography, but you must not show it.' I would have accepted right away. On the other hand, if someone had come to me saying: 'Here is money to do your photography, but after your death it must be destroyed,' I would have refused. ~ Josef Koudelka

You can also see sometimes that the best pictures are the ones where you didn't try so hard, where you were just enjoying the process - and you didn't even know why you were making the picture. It felt right. If someone asked, 'Why are you making this picture?' you probably couldn't describe it very well - and that's why it needs to be a photograph. ~ John Sexton

Photography is one of the most authentic and integral modes of expression possible in this world in which we live. ~ Clarence John Laughlin

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others - who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There's the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. ~ Joan Didion

I feel very lucky. I don't know what else there has to be. I'm happy, as corny as it sounds, to be living in a place where it's easy to live, easy to drive to the airport, easy to go pick up something at the supermarket and to have a circle of friends. Those were my goals in 1998, not to be queen of photography but to make a cultural adjustment to the West. And those are still more important goals to me than professional ones right now. ~ Andrea Modica

The best zoom lens is your legs. ~ Ernst Haas

The greatest compliment that I know how to pay another photographer is to say, 'I never would have made that photograph myself. I'm sure glad you did.' You hope along the way that maybe, once in a while, you do that for someone else. ~ John Sexton

There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They'll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about. ~ Brent Schlender

I was going round the world searching for an interesting place, when I realized that the place that I was in was already interesting. ~ Emmet Gowin

My generation came at a time when photography was advancing by leaps and bounds, creating the impulse to experiment and seek new approaches. ~ Gjon Mili

Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode. ~ Abigail Solomon-Godeau

If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture. ~ Robert Mapplethorpe

I saw a documentary on how ships are kept together. Riveting! ~ Stewart Francis

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life. ~ Paul Strand

Photography was so perfectly suited to my sensibility and situation, it gave me a voice, a kind of crazy, out-of-whack voice, at the beginning, but a voice. I could finally put into images bottled up feelings of absurdity and alienation - and also joy and delight. ~ Abelardo Morell

Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world. ~ Bruno Barbey

War crimes, you say?

No matter how many policies you put on paper, in reality, there are no rights and wrongs in war. War itself is a crime. War cannot be justified.

I believe, the only people, in this world, whose opinions matter, are the ones who go the extra mile to help other people expecting nothing in return.

Soldiers who fight fiercely for their country, the doctors in Sri Lanka's public hospitals attending to hundreds of patients at a time for no extra pay , the nuns who voluntarily teach English and math to children of refugee camps in the north, the monks who collect food to feed entire villages during crises, they are the people worth listening to, their opinion matters.

So find me one of them who will say: they wish the war didn't end in 2009, that they wish Sri Lanka was divided into two parts. Find me one of them who agrees with the international war crime allegations against Sri Lanka, and I will listen.

But I will not listen to the opinions of those who are paid to find faults in a war they were never a part of, a war they never experienced themselves. I will not listen to the opinions of those who watched the war on tv or read about it on the internet or were moved by a documentary on Al Jazeera.

The war is over. The damage is done. Let Sri Lanka move on. So our children will never have to see what we've seen. ~ Thisuri Wanniarachchi

I was lucky enough to go to college for four years. At what was supposedly a hippie school with no tests and no grades, blah blah blah, I wasn't learning that. I was taking photography classes. That stuff just wasn't talked about. It was like, "Does this picture have the right about of grey in it?" It wasn't even an art school. It was a state-run school. ~ Kathleen Hanna

Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don't have the answers. And if you don't have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else's solutions will seem appropriate. You'll have to come up with your own. ~ Chuck Close

As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc.," an overwhelmingly large percentage of "new," healthy," and "organic" alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. "They got you comin' and goin'" has never been truer. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I think everything can be painted because painting can change reality; but everything cannot be photographed and the photographer often comes home empty-handed, with images which (often) have a documentary interest, but which rarely go further than that. One has to be completely available, very tenacious and admit that many subjects won't give any results ... and a miracle sometimes happens, without warning. ~ Martine Franck

When I make a photograph I feel that I hold a piece of the universe in my hands. ~ Paul Chaplo