Bases Quote by Jack Delano

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

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

— Catherine Opie

My first priority when taking pictures is to achieve clarity. A good documentary photograph transmits the information of the situation with the utmost fidelity;…

— Sam Abell

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

When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police…

— Walker Evans

Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a…

— Hedi Slimane

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 think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.

— W. Eugene Smith

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 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

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 need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.

— Joan Fontcuberta