Photojournalists Quotes

If I wasn't a comic or TV star, I really wanted to be a photojournalist.

I don't want you to understand the details. To feel how it feels, you just have to be on the ground with the people. That's where photojournalists have a lot of magic.

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

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

You are not just a photojournalist, you're a historian.

I do love acting. But to work as a photojournalist would have been extraordinary.

Photojournalists know the horrors of war can only be exposed at close range. Kodak Film.

The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.

As photojournalists, we supply information to a world that is overwhelmed with preoccupations and full of people who need the company of images....We pass judgement on what we see, and this involves an enormous responsibility.

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

As an emerging photojournalist in the early 70s, my focus was on trying to create stories for magazines to the exclusion of almost everything else. I wish someone had told me then that the most personally important pictures you’ll ever make are those about you and your life.  I’m glad I had the chance to work for some great magazines, but I really miss those little everyday images, the ones that take place in and around your own life, which will never make the news.  Don’t sell yourself short: photograph your own life, not just everyone else’s.

Photojournalist? With a few exceptions, those of us working as photojournalists might now more appropriately call ourselves illustrators. For, unlike real reporters, whose job it is to document what's going down, most of us go out in the world expecting to give form to the magazine, or to newspaper editor's ideas, using what's become over the years a pretty standardized visual language. So we search for what is instantly recognizable, supportive of the text, easiest to digest, or most marketable - more mundane realities be damned.

I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this, I am a journalist - a photojournalist. But I am always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts. My principle concern is for honesty, above all honesty with myself.

Unfortunately, conflicts have always been there and they don't seem to be stopping. I'm a journalist and a photojournalist at heart, and I think that we have to be there always to cover it.

Among photojournalists there is still a sense that doing a photomontage is far graver than adding a filter. I am against this type of hierarchy that demonizes some options over others, demonizes them in respect to, what - ideology or moral code?

To be a photojournalist takes experience, skill, endurance, energy, salesmanship, organization, wheedling, climbing, gatecrashing, etc. - plus an eye and patience.

As we all know, the objective and mission of the photojournalist is to show us the reality of the world. And in order to capture that reality, they go to dangerous and tragic places at the expense of their lives. I see them as the conscience of our humanity; they represent for me what is left of our humanity.

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

If you photograph for a long time, you get to understand such things as body language. I often do not look at people I photograph, especially afterwards. Also when I want a photo, I become somewhat fearless, and this helps a lot. There will always be someone who objects to being photographed, and when this happens you move on.

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.

F8 And Be There! For years, this was the cry of the photojournalist. It meant that 90% of a great photo was being in the right place at the right time. True, it was simplistic, but in the Age of Photoshop, this maxim is too often forgotten. No matter how much you play with the bits and bytes, the best images always start out with a great vision, clearly and cleanly seen.

My evolution into becoming a photojournalist started with falling in love with literature when I was a teenager, falling in love with novels and imagining a life of being a storyteller.

Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work.

Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

The pictures are there, and you just take them.

Traditional photojournalists arrive with an idea of what they are going to produce or what the editor wants. I approach a subject very much as a street photographer and a wanderer, without preconceptions. I try to leave it extremely intuitive and exploratory.

Reporters listen, photographers look. If you are doing your job seriously as a photojournalist, your sight must be the primary sense that you use at all times.

Nothing came easy. I was just born with a need to explore every part of my mind. And with long searching and hard work, I became devoted to my restlessness.

...truth-telling may be an ethic, adopted by photojournalists as a behavior, but experience shows us that it is not embedded in the medium like silver salts in film.

What does a professional photojournalist do that others cannot? Depicting photo opportunities as if they are authentic, covering press conferences, or making subjects play their assigned roles (the poor as passive victims, celebrities as glamorous) are hardly adequate responses. In fact, these might be reasons to ask for the help of amateurs who do not know how to stylize their imagery and are not interested in making a publication seem more palatable to its potential consumers.

If you want to be a photographer, particularly a photojournalist , you want to learn about the world. You want to learn about yourself. And you want to find things that you genuinely care about, because that will be the source of your greatest work.