Photojournalism Quotes

Photojournalism is neither photography or journalism. It has its function but it's not where I see myself: the press is for me just a means for photographing, for material – not for telling the truth.

I only use a camera like I use a toothbrush. It does the job.

... photojournalism has its tremendous rewards and it's wonderful work. In what other work can you wander aimlessly with a camera around your neck, armed only with your personal interest and your eyes?

Running through a lot of traditional photojournalism there is an overwhelming sense of... pictures that say something, that define something. I'm not trying to define things. I'm trying to explore things. I'm trying to ask questions.

This idea of helping the next generation is a very intrinsic part of photojournalism. We need to continue to build this new group of photographers that come in and tell these stories.

If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that's a good picture.

The denunciation of suffering by photography has replaced the religious justification of suffering in painting. Denunciation is a function of photojournalism, and in itself that's a step in the right direction.

That [photographs] disturb readers is exactly as it should be: that's why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism.

When you've lived through the golden age of photojournalism, there's no point in being nostalgic.

I respect newspapers but the reality is that magazine "photojournalism" is finished. They want illustrations, Photoshopped pictures of movie stars.

I did it [photojournalism] as something that was really rewarding to do, given the opportunity to express myself about something I cared about, and also to learn a lot by watching filmmakers I admired. In a sense, it was my film school. After doing it for a few years, I decided that the time had come to get it together and do some work of my own. So I stopped doing that and wrote some screenplays on speculation, because even though I wanted to direct, to direct you need a lot of money.

If you are walking down the street, camera in your hand, loaded and ready to shoot. You see a person falling from a high building, either having fallen or jumped. That person is falling through space. You don't shoot that photograph unless the theme you are working on has to do with the effects of space on the human figure. If you simply photograph that event because it is an event that is happening, you're doing photojournalism.

After I discovered my degree in photojournalism would only get me a job in a camera store, I taught myself lighting. I read tons of magazines and books and studied the photos trying to figure out how they were done. I bought some flash equipment and played around until I figured out how to make a subject look as I envisioned it should look.

I stopped doing that [photojournalism] and wrote some screenplays on speculation, because even though I wanted to direct, to direct you need a lot of money. Even for a cheap movie, you need film stock and equipment and actors.

Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.

I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.

I have always felt that a lot of the most interesting work, not just mine but other people's, falls into [the] nether area, somewhere between the worlds of documentary and photojournalism (two very vague words) and the world of art. I think a lot of street photography falls into this nether area.

And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.

What is photojournalism? Occasionally, a very unique photo, in which form is precise and rich enough and content has enough resonance, is sufficient in itself. But that's rarely the case. The elements of a subject that speak to us are often scattered and can't be captured in one photo; we don't have the right to force them together, and to stage them would be cheating...which brings us to the need for photojournalism.

If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.

[Photojournalism] really is the only branch of photography that's a credit to our profession. We see, we understand; we see more, we understand more.

I have a completely worthless degree: a BS in Photojournalism from Boston University (BU). With this degree, I suppose I could have gotten a job teaching grade school kids how to photograph their relatives, but knowing about B&W photo processing and developing and how to shoot a picture story is good basic info that every photographer should have.

War isn't a TV show with plot twists to keep the viewers interested. The proliferation of images and blanket media coverage have suffocated the life out of old-style photojournalism.

Photojournalism has become a hybrid enterprise of amateurs and professionals, along with surveillance cameras, Google Street Views, and other sources. What is underrepresented are those "metaphotographers" who can make sense of the billions of images being made and can provide context and authenticate them. We need curators to filter this overabundance more than we need new legions of photographers.

The pictures are there, and you just take them.

I always believed that photography was subjective, interpretive and certainly did not represent the truth, but I did think that its status as a societal and historical referent needed to be both safeguarded and illuminated....now photojournalism is devolving into yet another medium perceived as intending to shock, titillate, sell, distort.

One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.