[Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because…

For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make…

— Giles Duley

I don't see how a woman in documentary photography could have children. I think it's a very difficult thing to do to raise a…

— Mary Ellen Mark

I have tried to bring about better communication between people. I believe that humanitarian photography is like economics. Economy is a kind of sociology,…

— Sebastiao Salgado

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…

— Ansel Adams

Newspaper photographs nowadays are highly tautologous. You'll have an article about, say, stopping the war. And the photograph that will be used is literally…

— Stuart Franklin

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…

— Jack Delano

Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror,…

— Allan Sekula

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…

— Taryn Simon

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…

— Sally Mann

I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best…

— Aaron Siskind

I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.

— W. Eugene Smith

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…

— Aaron Siskind

Many people in this world do jobs that are dangerous and where their life is at risk and they feel that there is some…

— James Nachtwey

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of…

— Christopher Lasch

I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, 'What relationship has it with what's going on?' I found there was…

— Martin Parr