Photojournalist Quotes & Sayings

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 ... — W. Eugene Smith

In my 20s, when I was a photojournalist in Beijing. I joined an underground art group and put on clandestine exhibitions of my paintings. — Ma Jian

I went through a few phases of finding myself: I dabbled in musical theater, chess club, dance troupe, splatter-painting, school mascot (go Wildcats), babysitter, photojournalist, drill team girl, emo kid - and not one of them defined me, but every single one will always play a part in who I am. — Debby Ryan

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. — Bill Eppridge

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. — Ed Kashi

I have been blessed to realize my dream of becoming an underwater photojournalist, but with that, I feel an obligation and sense of urgency to share what I have seen with others. — Brian Skerry

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. — Dewitt Jones

If I wasn't a comic or TV star, I really wanted to be a photojournalist. That was my other dream job. — Drew Carey

I am not a photojournalist and certainly not used to the Jason Bourne type stuff that some photographers have to deal with. — Platon

a photojournalist. Eventually she had come to understand — Barbara Taylor Bradford

Even though I left school at age fifteen, I loved learning and continued to learn through my careers as a photojournalist, filmmaker, and explorer. I was taught that education is the great equalizer and knowledge is power. I prefer to think that knowledge is understanding; the more one knows, the less one fears. — Marc Ashton

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. — Shaul Schwarz

There's a tired notion that the photojournalist has to be disengaged to be able to shoot what he shoots, and that's such a cliched idea of what the experience is. Of course they're engaged, and they're not distanced. — Michael Mann

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. — Alfredo Jaar

I'm not a photojournalist. — Robert Mapplethorpe

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. — David

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. — Fred Ritchin

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

The possibility to mobilize the international community to act on human suffering is what drives me every day as a photojournalist. — Lynsey Addario

The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs entail different talents and different desires. — Lynsey Addario

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. — Ed Kashi

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. — Eugene Richards

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

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

The truth was, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist was the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two had in common was the blank page. — Lynsey Addario