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Documentarian Inspirational Quotes (77)

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I can photograph someone if I can touch them.
Eugene Richards
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Just consider the CIA and its effort to suppress the Senate's review of its torture program. Take in the fact that we live in a country that a) legalized torture and b) where no one was ever held to account for it, and now the government's internal look at what happened is being suppressed by the CIA. That's a frightening landscape to be in.
Laura Poitras
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Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.
Allan Sekula
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I don't really know what I want, other than good sequences, whatever that means. What I find is always a matter of chance, judgment, and luck.
Frederick Wiseman
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I'm coming from journalism, but at the same time I'm tempted by poetry, politics, and maybe the idea of being a witness, a belief that you can still change things with the image.
Raymond Depardon
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I am bad at cultural generalizations but I would venture to say that by a wide margin there is less hypocrisy about sex in France than in America.
Frederick Wiseman
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This benefit of seeing...can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image...the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.
Dorothea Lange
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To know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.
Dorothea Lange
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I had no contact with my contemporaries in the photographic field, nor even knowledge of their work. So I was influenced by no-one and there were no short cuts for me. I was self-taught the hard way, by trial and error.
George Rodger
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I like to be on my own when I look at my contact sheets, because I'm often disappointed... But as years go by we become proud of our old contact sheets. They are a tool that allows us to fight against time.
Raymond Depardon
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... it came to me that what I had to do was to take pictures and concentrate upon people, only people, all kinds of people, people who paid me and people who didn't.
Dorothea Lange
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How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?
Allan Sekula
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There's never a time that I'm not intrusive. That's the base of what we - photographers - do: we're intrusive. Anyone saying the opposite is silly. There's a process and a means of getting to know people and getting them to trust you, but I'm always very aware that I'm visiting - that I'm there, that I have a responsibility, but I am intrusive.
Eugene Richards
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Certainly, when it comes to my profession as a journalist, that allows the government to trace what you're reporting, who you're talking to, and where you've been. So no matter whether or not I have a commitment to protect my sources, the government may still have information that might allow them to identify whom I'm talking to.
Laura Poitras
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Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.
Dorothea Lange
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The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange
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The only objective truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something... was somewhere and took a picture.
Allan Sekula
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A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
Dorothea Lange
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Even if I know I'm going to go to a church, I don't know what the minister's going to say.
Frederick Wiseman
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Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If not, the machine can destroy us.
Dorothea Lange
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I do not think that my films or films by any other filmmaker represent THE TRUTH. I do not feel the need to categorize my films or anyone else's.
Frederick Wiseman
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What I'm passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.
Chris Marker
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When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.
Chris Marker
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Black-and-white photos tell the truth. That's why insurance companies use them.
Allan Sekula
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