Appreciation Quote by Ansel Adams

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

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

The documentary style is an incredibly flexible and useful one. It's a wonderful tool for establishing the credibility of the version of things that's…

— Frank Gohlke

...I don't see myself as a documentary photographer. I am more drawn to the image itself, rather than to the description of a scene.…

— Beat Streuli

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 unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist…

— Pierre Mac Orlan

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

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.

— Catherine Opie

“The paradox is that some of the most artistically valuable contemporary photographs are content with being photographs, are not under the same compulsion to…

— Geoff Dyer

What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and…

— Walker Evans

Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the 'good' photograph.

— Laszlo Moholy-Nagy