Photojournalism in 5 minutes: notes from personal pages of Magnum photographers

Abbas - "My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation. Spontaneity - the suspended moment - intervenes during action, in the viewfinder."

Christopher Anderson - Quote: "Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that it is just a trick."

Eve Arnold - Quote: "If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument."

Micha Bar-Am - Quote: "If you're too close to events, you lose perspective. It is not easy to be fair with the facts and keep your own convictions out of the picture. It is almost impossible to be both a participant in the events and their observer, witness, interpreter."

Bruno Barbey - Quote: "Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world."

Jonas Bendicksen - Quote: "I love working on stories that get left behind in the race for the daily headlines - journalistic orphans. Often, the most worthwhile and convincing images tend to lurk within the hidden, oblique stories that fly just below the radar."

Ian Berry - Quote: "The great single picture is emotionally satisfying, whereas getting a good journalistic story is more about being a professional."

Werner Bischof - Quote: "I felt compelled to venture forth and explore the true face of the world. Leading a satisfying life of plenty had blinded many of us to the immense hardships beyond our borders."

Rene Burri - Quote: "I never thought I would become a photographer."

Cornell Capa - Quote: "One thing that Life and I agreed right from the start was that one war photographer was enough for my family; I was to be a photographer of peace."

Robert Capa - Quote: "If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough."

Henri Cartier-Bresson - Quote: "To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life."

Chien-Chi Chang - Quote: "Photography is still instinctual, but I am more disciplined now. I am trying to make every frame count, just as in Tai Chi every breath counts."

Antoine D'Agata - Quote: "It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's their intimate relationship with it."

Bruce Davidson - Quote: "If I am looking for a story at all, it is in my relationship to the subject - the story that tells me, rather than that I tell."

Carl De Keyzer - Quote: "I want to question the images that are in our memory. There is always a double level in my work; what you see is true and at the same time not true."

Raymond Depardon - Quote: "The photographer is filled with doubt. Nothing will soothe him."

Thomas Dworzak - Quote: "I like the fact that I am not in control, that the photographs are what happens, rather than the result only of the decision I make. You could say that’s the downside of photography, but it’s also why it is magic."

Nikos Economopolous - Quote: "I prefer to spend my time in my corner of the world: south Europe and west Asia, where I understand the codes and can make connections."

Elliott Erwitt - Quote: "It's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy."

Martine Franck - Quote: "A photograph isn't necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It's more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can't anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected."

Stuart Franklin - Quote: "I love photographing. It's that simple."

Leonard Freed - Quote: "Ultimately photography is about who you are. It's the seeking of truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit."

Paul Fusco - Quote: "I want the viewers to be moved into the lives of the people that they are looking at, the visual experience is incredibly emotional."

Cristina Garcia Rodero - Quote:"I tried to photograph the mysterious, true and magical soul of popular Spain in all its passion, love, humor, tenderness, rage, pain, in all its truth; and the fullest and most intense moments in the lives of these characters as simple as they are irresistible, with all their inner strength, as a personal challenge that gave me strength and understanding and in which I invested all my heart."

Jean Gaumy - Quote: "Taking pictures is like fishing or writing. It's getting out of the unknown that which resists and refuses to come to light."

Bruce Gilden - Quote "I'm known for taking pictures very close, and the older I get, the closer I get."

Burt Glinn - Quote: "I think that what you've got to do is discover the essential truth of the situation, and have a point of view about it."

Jim Goldberg - Quote: "My work is based in trust. I don't work well just snapping pictures, although some people would say the opposite. I really feel like intimacy and trust are the guide to my work."

Philip Jones Griffiths - Quote: "The ability to keep things in perspective is very important for a journalist. In a tense situation you need the ability to be there, yet somehow step aside; to keep a cool head and keep working without getting frustrated."

Harry Gruyaert - Quote: "I was living in London at the end of the 1960s when I became aware of the brainwashing power of television….I became interested in making a portrait of England by photographing the TV screen."

Philippe Halsman - Quote: "Most people stiffen with self-consciousness when they pose for a photograph. Lighting and fine camera equipment are useless if the photographer cannot make them drop the mask, at least for a moment, so he can capture on his film their real, undistorted personality and character. "

Erich Hartmann - Quote: "A large portion of my work is concerned with people because people are the most inventive and news-making part of our lives. Yet I am as much attracted to the evidence of their presence and efforts, whether good or evil, as I am to the people themselves."

David Alan Harvey - Quote: "It's a lot of work living the life that you want to live, but that's what I'm doing."

Thomas Hoepker - Quote: "I am not an artist. I am an image maker".

David Hurn - Quote: "Life as it unfolds in front of the camera is full of so much complexity, wonder and surprise that I find it unnecessary to create new realities. There is more pleasure, for me, in things as-they-are."

Richard Kalvar - Quote: "The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography."

Josef Koudelka - Quote: "The maximum, that is what has always interested me."

Hiroji Kubota - Quote: "I love beautiful things, and I want to make pictures that lift people's spirits. I see the giving and receiving of photographs as something beautiful and personal."

Sergio Larrain - Quote: "A good image is created by a state of grace. Grace expresses itself when it has been freed from conventions, free like a child in his early discovery of the reality. The game is then to organize the rectangle."

Guy Le Querrec - Quote: "A photographer is an acrobat treading the high wire of chance, trying to capture shooting stars."

Erich Lessing - Quote: "I saw my job as providing documentation. I'm certainly not a storyteller in the way that a novelist is a storyteller. Reportage was not the sophisticated thing then that it is today."

Herbert List - Quote: "The pictures I took spontaneously - with a bliss-like sensation, as if they had long inhabited my unconscious - were often more powerful than those I had painstakingly composed. I grasped their magic as in passing. "

Alex Majoli - Quote: "We should think of a photographer as a Samurai who makes rituals, moves and gestures in order to develop his techniques and his instinct."

Constantine Manos - Quote: "The flow of people in a setting, their changing relationships to each other and their environment, and their constantly changing expressions and movements - all combine to create dynamic situations that provide the photographer with limitless choices of when to push the button. By choosing a precise intersection between subject and time, he may transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and the real into the surreal."

Peter Marlow - Quote: "Photographing news is all about being in the right place."

Steve McCurry - Quote: "What is important to my work is the individual picture. I photograph stories on assignment, and of course they have to be put together coherently. But what matters most is that each picture stands on its own, with its own place and feeling."

Susan Meiselas - Quote: "The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation."

Wayne Miller - Quote: "I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs."

Inge Morath - Quote: "To take pictures had become a necessity and I did not want to forgo it for anything."

Trent Parke - Quote: "The first pictures I shot were wet foot prints I'd left along a path. I just turned around and saw them and shot. It was a first picture and from that point it was the sort of thing I've photographed ever since - just things that I'm curious about, or saw, that I'm interested in...like dragon flies in a spider web."

Martin Parr - Quote: "With photography, I like to create fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist."

Paolo Pellegrin - Quote: "I'm more interested in a photography that is 'unfinished' - a photography that is suggestive and can trigger a conversation or dialogue. There are pictures that are closed, finished, to which there is no way in."

Gilles Peress - Quote:"I don't care so much anymore about 'good photography'; I am gathering evidence for history".

Gueorgui Pinkhassov - Quote: "The power of our Muse lies in her meaninglessness. Even the style can turn one into a slave if one does not run away from it, and then one is doomed to repeat oneself. The only thing that counts is curiosity. For me personally, this is what creativity is about. It will express itself less in the fear of doing the same thing over again than in the desire not to go where one has already been."

Mark Power - Quote: "Now that everyone in the developed world seems to own some form of camera, a different space has opened for documentary photographers. It's a space free from specific events, where there are different expectations, where it is first and foremost about ideas. Now we can all take pictures, with varying degrees of consistency, more than ever before it's about what we do with photography."

Raghu Rai - Quote: "A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever."

Eli Reed - Quote: "The main thing for me is that I'm happy that I've been able to work as a professional photographer. What is at the core of my work is, in essence, a mediation on being a human being."

Miguel Rio Branco - Quote: "Since the beginning, I have always relied on interbreeding. Painting meeting photography. Drawing meeting collage. Photography meeting cinema. Music meeting poetry. Poetry meeting montage. All these meetings are part of the many crossroads in the search for a comprehension and expression of myself in relation to the world."

George Rodger - Quote: "You must feel an affinity for what you are photographing. You must be part of it, and yet remain sufficiently detached to see it objectively. Like watching from the audience a play you already know by heart."

Lise Sarfati - Quote: "When using photography it is necessary to know your secret wills."

Ferdinando Scianna - Quote: "A photograph is not created by a photographer. What they does is just to open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world."

David Seymour - Quote: "'All you need,' he once said as a noted photographer orated on the psychology behind one of his pictures, 'is a little bit of luck and enough muscle to click the shutter.' He might have added: a good eye, a heart and a knowing nose for news. For all of these were obvious in his work."
(Judith Friedberg on David Seymour in "Photographic")

Marilyn Silverstone - Quote:"A photograph is a subjective impression. It is what the photographer sees. No matter how hard we try to get into the skin, into the feeling of the subject or situation, however much we empathize, it is still what we see that comes out in the images, it is our reaction to the subject and in the end, the whole corpus of our work becomes a portrait of ourselves."

Eugene Smith - Quote:"Photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes - just sometimes - one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought."

Alec Soth - Quote: "I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance."

Jacob Aue Sobol - Quote: "When I photograph, I try to use my instincts as much as possible. It is when pictures are thoughtless and irrational that they come to life; that they evolve from showing to being."

Chris Steele-Perkins - Quote: "Everything shifts as you move, and different things come into focus at different points of your life, and you try to articulate that."

Dennis Stock - Quote: "Art is a well-articulated manifestation of an aspect of life. I have been privileged to view much of life through my cameras, making the journey an enlightened experience. My emphasis has mainly been on affirmative reactions to human behavior and a strong attraction to the beauty in nature."

Mkhael Subotzky - Quote: "For me, photography has become a way of attempting to make sense of the very strange world that I see around me. I don't ever expect to achieve that understanding, but the fact that I am trying comforts me"

Larry Towell - Quote: "If there's one theme that connects all my work, I think it's that of land-lessness; how land makes people into who they are and what happens to them when they lose it and thus lose their identities."

John Vink - Quote: "Photography cannot do much. It provides some level of information, yet it has no pretensions about changing the world."

Alex Webb - Quote: "I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner."

Simon Wheatley - Quote: "The most important thing is: You don't give up. Believe in what you are doing. The moment you stop believing in a story you are doing then that story is over."

Donovan Wylie - Quote: "The idea of photography seemed to come together with the idea that this is how I could be - someone who could have one step in the world while at the same time being one step removed from it."

Patrick Zachmann - Quote: "Je suis devenu photographe parce que je n'ai pas de mémoire. La photographie me permet de reconstituer les albums de famille que je n'ai jamais eus, dont les images manquantes sont devenues le moteur de mes recherches. Mes planches-contacts sont mon journal intime."