Lynsey Addario Quotes

If you've got a camera, go to a war zone and tell a story.

I became a photographer in order to be a war photographer, and a photographer involved in what I thought were critical social issues. From the very beginning this was my goal.

I've been in wars and in riots and hung out of many helicopters in the early days. And there's a detachment that happens when you look through the camera. You're looking for the shot.

As a photographer who is constantly in violent, bloody situations where the instinct is to turn away, I am always trying to figure out how to make people not turn away.

Sometimes in news photography and so on, the pictures are a little bit dry, and put on the page and just set in a journalistic way in front of you.

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.

I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life

From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.

If you are truly successful in capturing the pulse of life, then you can speak of a good photograph.

Obviously I am a photographer and I believe in my medium: I do think that powerful photographs can force change. It doesn't take long to look and be engaged in a strong image whereas, with a story, you have to actually sit down and pause and be involved in it.

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

'America 24/7' will be a landmark series in documentary photography and the watershed event of the new digital photography age.

I felt like I was in the best photography school in the world - I had Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn teach me.

I photograph different people all the time. I like to shoot all kinds of people.

I think there are two types of photographers, those who want to document the world and those who want to create their own world. I am more interested in documenting the world and presenting it to people with the question attached, 'Does this make any sense to you?'

I don't want to knock photography, and I don't feel that film is up there but photography isn't. I think they're next to each other really, you know. There's an incredible strength to a still picture. Or there can be an incredible strength to a still picture that can outlive you. That can outlive a film.

I'm not a war photographer. I've always dealt with the consequences of conflict.

In my 20 years as a photographer, covering conflicts from Bosnia to Gaza to Iraq to Afghanistan, injured civilians and soldiers have passed through my life many times.

I'd go down to the end of my street, to a garage that had a certain feeling about it, or a particular light; I'd take a picture of a friend who needed a head shot. That's how I learned, instead of having school assignments and learning camera techniques.

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

I think that's the strength of photography - to decide the decisive moment, to click in the moment to come up with a picture that never comes back again.

As much as I'm not a journalist, I use journalism. And when you photograph a relationship, it's quite wonderful to let something unfold in front of you.

I started photographing people on the street during World War II. I used a little box Brownie. Nothing too expensive.

I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.

Except when war is waged in a desert, noncombatants, also known as civilians or "the people," constitute the great majority of those affected.