"One has to be ready to jump in. The photographer uses the reality that the opportunity of art offers him. But he never masters it, never conquers it. Reality, the man on the street, is free and unpredictable. Somehow, the photographer has to anticipate the movements, foresee them. He has to be alert and flexible, ready for sudden changes of plan."
Ricard Terré
"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it."
Dorothea Lange
"I photographed Arthur Coble and his sons Milton and Darrel as they did chores, but the vicious winds made it difficult to see and breathe. As dust began to fill the air, I headed for my car and the Cobles started walking to the farmhouse. When I got in my car, I wanted to wave goodbye. I turned and saw the family fighting the wind and took this photograph - the last frame on the roll of film."
Arthur Rothstein
"People have always debated whether or not photography is art. I didn't think I was creating artwork when I was taking photographs. I wasn't interested in producing a work of art to put in a museum for the few people who visit museums to see. I wanted to produce images of reality as I saw it, so that it could be reproduced in books, newspapers, magazines and exhibitions - so that as many people as possible would see them. That was our attitude, that of those of us who worked in that famous Farm Security Administration group. But it turned out that we, most of the photographers there, had artistic sensibility. Although we didn't try to create works of art, some of the pieces inevitably became artworks. But that wasn't the intention; the intention was to distribute them as widely as possible."
Jack Delano
"[...] Photographic shots are owing to the chance turn of situations, but the obsessions remain the same. Nocturnal drifts, bodies left behind, the rawness of flesh and of the photographic material. Translate into a split due to the mixture of bodies and feelings, in an incessant shifting of the line between the photographer and his subject that disappear, forever exhausted, between two ephemeral encounters. Lucid photography must enquire into the disturbing conditions of its experience between the eye and the gaze, the machine and the subconscious, the fundamental impurity of its relationship with the real world and the fictitious.
It is not our outlook on the world that matters but our most intimate relations with it. Composition, light, narration -these are no longer the fundamental questions. What remains is the perspective that justifies the photographic act, the interferences of experience and mise-en-scène, the material, the role of the character, the incoherencies of sequencing -images, like words, feel lonely when isolated- and the awareness that I am the actor, author and director of my own scenes. Therefore, through the maniacal reconstruction of disordered experiences, I can use the world for my own ends and, as a rather solitary experience, reshape and transform it to suite my fancy, make it so that, without the images, the world no longer exists."
Antoine D'Agata