If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug a camera.

-Lewis Hine

I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot photograph.

-Man Ray

There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.

-Abraham Lincoln

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

-Ansel Adams

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

-Dorothea Lange

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

-Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn't attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don't see.

-Emmet Gowin

The weight of words. The shock of photos! -Paris-Match, advertisement

The picture of Mayor William Gaynor of New York at the moment of being shot by an assassin in 1910. The Mayor was about to board a ship to go on holiday in Europe as an American newspaper photographer arrived. He asked the Mayor to pose for a picture and as he raised his camera two shots were fired from the crowd. In the midst of this confusion the photographer remained calm and his picture of the blood-spattered Mayor lurching into the arms of an aide has become part of photographic history.

-a caption in "Click"; A Pictorial History of the Photograph (1974)

To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it

necessarily wrongly.

-Nietzsche

In the spring of 1921, two automatic photographic machines,

recently invented abroad, were installed in Prague, which

reproduced six or ten or more exposures of the same person on a single print. When I took such a series of photographs to Kafka I said light-heartedly: "For a couple of krone one can have oneself photographed from every angle. The apparatus is a mechanical Know- Thyself"

"You mean to say, the Mistake- Thyself," said Kafka, with a faint smile. I protested: "What do you mean? The camera cannot lie!"

"Who told you that?" Kafka leaned his head toward his shoulder. "Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glinners through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling.... This automatic camera doesn't multiply men's eyes but only gives a fantastically simplified fly's eye view."

-from Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka

Oswiecim, Poland-Nearly 30 years after Auschwitz concentration camp was closed down, the underlying horror of the place seems diminished by the souvenir stands, Pepsi-Cola signs and the tourist -attraction atmosphere. Despite chilling autumn rain, thousands of Poles and some foreigners visit Auschwitz every day. Most are modishly dressed and obviously too young to remember World War II. They troop through the former prison barracks, gas chambers and crematoria, looking with interest at such gruesome displays as an enormous showcase filled with some of the human hair the S.S. used to make into cloth.... At the souvenir stands, visitors can buy a selection of Auschwitz lapel pins in Polish and German, or picture postcards showing gas chambers and crematoria, or even souvenir Auschwitz ballpoint pens which, when held up to the light, reveal similar pictures.

-from The New York Times, November 3, 1974 At Auschwitz, a Discordant Atmosphere of Tourism")

He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera.

-Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth