Approach Quote by Simon Norfolk

How useful are documentary photographs if there is no follow up, no way of knowing what happened next in the story?

— Martha Rosler

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

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 think that there isn't a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability... They do not tell stories - they show you…

— Garry Winogrand

The idea of photography as evidence is pure bullshit. A photo is no more proof of any reality than what you may hear being…

— Marc Riboud

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

What's important to me is that [photographs] have the appearance of being documents of what goes on. I like the illusion of veracity, that…

— Larry Sultan

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

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people, of distant…

— Susan Sontag

Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells…

— Duane Michals

“Photographs, like ghosts, are the persistence of memory. Over time, people fade from our recollection, or change. Their faces become kinder or more cruel,…

— Barbara Nickless

...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