Art Quote by Frank Gohlke

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

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 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 is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as…

— Allan Sekula

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

I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There's not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the…

— Spike Jonze

Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by…

— Martha Rosler

The nice thing about a documentary, I think, is that so much of it is editing, too. You sort of get to keep making…

— Gillian Jacobs

The picture is not a documentary, ... It's a drama that has to be crafted. Reality is not art. You have to make choices…

— Mark Rydell

[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

Actually, documentary pictures include every subject in the world - good, bad, indifferent. I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not…

— Berenice Abbott

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

— Catherine Opie