Documentary Photography Quotes

• For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.

  Giles Duley

  Photography, Pain, Responsibility

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  Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

  Dorothea Lange

  Inspirational, Life, Change

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• 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

  Photography, Men, Essentials

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• To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

  Elliott Erwitt

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Photography

  "You Might Be a Cowgirl If . . .: A Guide to Life on the Range" by Jill Charlotte Stanford, Robin L. Corey, Globe Pequot, (p. 111), September 4, 2012.

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  The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

  Dorothea Lange

  Inspirational, Photography, Creativity

  Dorothea Lange, Robert Coles (1982). “Photographs of a Lifetime”

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• [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

  Photography, Artist, Documentaries

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• If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.

  Robert Capa

  Photography, Photographer, Good Enough

  Robert Capa (1987). “Robert Capa: cuadernos de guerra en España (1936-1939).”

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  One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.

  Dorothea Lange

  Photography, Reality, Cameras

  Anne Whiston Spirn, Dorothea Lange (2009). “Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field”, University Of Chicago Press

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• 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

  Photography, Envy, Understanding

  Allan Sekula, Illinois State University. University Galleries (1999). “Dismal science: photo works, 1972-1996”, Illinois State Univ

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• While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

  Dorothea Lange

  Life, Photography, Eye

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• I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.

  W. Eugene Smith

  Photography, Thinking, Purpose

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• 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

  Photography, Emotional, Would Be

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• 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

  Photography, Art, Mean

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• A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

  Dorothea Lange

  Life, Photography, Documentaries

  Dorothea Lange, Robert Coles (1982). “Photographs of a Lifetime”

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• 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

  Photography, Believe, Communication

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• 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

  Photography, Honesty, Tired

  Interview with Geoffrey Batchen, Nell McClister, www.museomagazine.com.

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• 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

  Photography, Jobs, People

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• 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

  Photography, Thinking, Passionate

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• The dismal half-baked images of the average "reportage" and "documentary" photography are self dammning... the slick manner, the slightly obscure significance, the esoteric fear of simple beauty for its own sake - I am deeply concerned with these manifestations of decay. Gene Smith's work validates my most vigorous convictions that if the documentary photographs is to be truly effective it must contain elements of art, intensity, fine craft and spirituality. All these his work contains and we may turn to his work with gratitude, appreciation and great respect.

  Ansel Adams

  Photography, Appreciation, Gratitude

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