Photojournalism Quotes

“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Every time we raise the camera to our eyes, we become morally responsible to “the photographed” as well as the viewers. Photography cannot be just a privilege, it’s a responsibility that should not be abdicated.”
― Neeta Satam

“I wanted to make people think, to open their minds, to give them a full picture of what was happening in Iraq so they can decide whether they supported our presence there.”
― Lynsey Addario

“We should strive to focus our lens on what connects us as humans as opposed to our differences. In doing so, not only can we challenge the Orientalist and colonial aspects of traditional photographic narratives, but we can also create a new visual legacy marked by equitable discourse.”
― Neeta Satam

“There had to be something new, some fresh angle. As the rain pattered down around him, Kapenda thought. What was the weirdest thing he'd seen since this all started? He'd been in the tiny town of Chew Stoke a few weeks earlier, filming the remains of a vehicle that had been washed into a culvert and whose driver had died. In Grovehill, no one had died yet but there were abandoned cars strewn along the streets and surrounding tracks, hulking shapes that the water broke around and flowed over in fractured, churning flurries.

That was old. Every television station had those shots.

He'd been there the year before when the police had excavated a mud-filled railway tunnel and uncovered the remains of two people who had been crushed in a landslide. What they needed was something like that here, something that showed how weak man's civilized veneer was when set against nature's uncaring ferocity. He needed something that contrasted human frailty and natural strength, something that Dali might have painted - a boat on a roof, or a shark swimming up the main street. He needed that bloody house to collapse.

("Into The Water")”
― Simon Kurt Unsworth, Best New Horror: Volume 25

“In our time photojournalists were as important as the writers. Today not so. Photojournalism is diminishing. Now everyone is a free artist, which can only be in photography. For he is taking pictures! Releases the shutter and becomes an artist. Godsend people they are, otherwise the world was doomed. They are so significant. I fear bumping into one of these celebrities walking in the street, which would be very disrespectful indeed.”
― Ara Güler, Fotocep

“When you raise the camera to your eye you become responsible for contextualizing the history of the person you are photographing. It is critical that photographers take that responsibility as seriously as they do the photograph itself. Stories need to be approached with intellectual curiosity rather than a mere visual curiosity. It is also critical they consider the people they are photographing as collaborators, not “subjects.”
― Neeta Satam

“Finding a protest without placards is like photographing a hippie without a bong.”
― Steve Merrick

“Visual violence is the impact caused by the constant, unrelenting and dehumanizing way Black and Brown skinned people are depicted visually. If it’s not poverty, it’s plight. If it’s not plight, it’s pain. If it’s not pain, it’s poverty.”
― Shaun Connell