Quotes & Sayings About War Photographers

There are photographers who push for war because they make stories. They search for a Chinese who has a more Chinese are than the others and they end up finding one. They have him take a typically Chinese pose and surround him with chinoiseries. What have they captured on their film? A Chinese? Definitely not: the idea of the Chinese. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I think it is fair to say that all war photographers hide behind their cameras. I hid behind mine for years and years and years. It was a shield ... I think that the photographer in combat has a greater protection than the soldier who has a rifle in his hand. That camera has unbelievable protective power. — Carl Mydans

The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar. — Timothy Snyder

With each assignment, I weigh the looming possibility of being killed, and I chastise myself for allowing fear to hinder me. War photographers aren't supposed to get scared. — Lynsey Addario

Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade ... to places like famine and war and ... I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket because this to me is the front line. — Martin Parr

He had not understood that we were combat photographers, and our jobs were as relevant and justifiable - or as irrelevant and unjustifiable - as anyone's in Vietnam. — Nick Mills

From seven hundred journalists at the beginning of March, the number had dwindled to about one hundred and fifty - print reporters, TV correspondents, photographers, cameramen, and support personnel. At the press center I encountered Kazem, who only a week before I had asked for help with my visa. "Why are you staying when everyone else is leaving?" he asked. I took a chance and replied in Arabic. Some journalists, I said, are as samid as the Iraqi people. Samid means "steadfast" and "brave" and is the adjective most often used by Iraqis to describe themselves. Kazem laughed and threw his arm around my shoulder. — Richard Engel

The Queen, watching from home, noted how the war began as a prodigiously popular thing; but this was the first war at which photographers, and a good war reporter (William Russell of The Times), had been present. When the inefficiency, and the sickness, and the sheer horror of the conflict became known, the public turned their wrath on the politicians. The — A. N. Wilson

It is pretentious for photographers to believe that their pictures alone change things. If they did, we wouldn't be besieged by war, by incidents of genocide, by hunger. A more realistic assessment of photography's value is to point out that it is illustrative of what's going on, that it provides a record of history, that photographs can prompt dialogue. — Eugene Richards