Art Quote by Pierre Mac Orlan

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

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

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

Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of…

— Beaumont Newhall

“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

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

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 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

...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

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