• “A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.”

    Irving Penn.

    Noted in Popular Photography, February 1956.

  • “Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”

    Henri Cartier-Bresson.

    1952. The Decisive Moment. 2014 Ed. Göttingen: Steidl.

  • “A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph per se. It is a photograph which carries the full meaning of the episode.”

    Dorothea Lange.

    1960-61, published 1968. Interview with Suzanne Riess. The Making of a Documentary Photographer. University of California Bancroft Library.

  • “A photographer … gets right inside the story, gets accepted as part of it, stands in the right place at the right time, and presses the shutter.”

    Bill Hurn.

    Jay, Bill & Hurn, David. 1996. On Being a Photographer.

  • “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”


    Ansel Adams.