Magnum Photographer Quotes

One day we are looking at the Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren at the Christian Dior show in Paris in 1968 and thinking yes, it could be me, I could wear that dress, I was in Paris that year; a blink of the eye later we are in one or another doctor's office being told what has already gone wrong, why we will never again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, never again wear the gold hoop earrings, the enameled beads, never now wear the dress Sophia Loren is wearing.

In the hands of a Magnum photographer, the camera is not just an objective eye, but an instrument to enlighten and inform, a stimulating force to influence opinion and sometimes to speak for those with no voice.

What is most satisfying for a photographer,’ he noted ‘is not recognition, success and so forth. It’s communication: what you say can mean something to other people, can be of certain importance. . . The photographer’s task is not to prove anything about a human event. We’re not advertisers; we’re witnesses of the transitory.

There are two kinds of photographers, the ones who take pictures for a magazine, and the ones who gain something by taking pictures they are interested in.

Anyone can be a photographer, even a monkey can be taught to do that, but a developer, no. It is the work of real craftsmen, exactly like an engraver, a real profession.

Capa left for Japan on 11 April and was delighted with the reception he received. He travelled to Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Kobe and Amagasaki, thoroughly enjoying being in a country he described to a friend as a ‘photographer’s paradise’ and unaware that mundane events would soon interrupt his idyll.

Now correspondents were coming into Saigon from the outside, traveling on R and R planes. Among them was Oriana Fallaci. She later wrote a book of reminiscences about her Tet experiences which I found somewhat baffling. According to Oriana, she had had to talk panic-stricken U.S. sergeants into providing her with transport to get to the city. The craven U.S. troops at Tan Son Nhut airport had apparently had to be galvanized into action by this frail but intrepid reporter. "Are you a man or a mouse?" she asked them. [...] Maybe Oriana Fallaci's readers were conditioned to see every manifestation of their heroic girl reporter in cliche, comic-strip terms. Correspondents have a technical term for this kind of reporting. It comes under the generic term hyping. Oriana Fallaci, and a few others, were masters of this peculiar art form, which invariably requires an element of factual truth to which the hype is convincingly added. Thus, Oriana Fallaci undoubtedly arrived in Saigon in the middle of Tet, and yes, she did get to Hue in the middle of the fighting with a number of other reporters. But no sooner did she reach the outskirts of Hue than she had to be put back on the first truck convoy, with a bad case of nerves, by Philip Jones-Griffiths, the Magnum photographer. This proved no bar to her subsequent personal account of the fighting, which—as in the case of the Dak To assault—drew liberally on other reporters' stories.