War Documentation Quotes

The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now people will be writing and reading about it.

Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is - and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin.

I think the best war photos I have taken have always been made when a battle was actually taking place - when people were confused and scared and courageous and stupid and showed all these things. When you look at people right at the very moment of truth, everything is quite human. You take a picture at this moment with all the mistakes in it, with everything that might be confusing to the reader, but that's the right combat photo.

... the blinding Hiroshima flash... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film.

The only other human endeavor on which there's more 16-millimeter film than pro football is World War II, and we're going to pass that in 2013.

I did a lot of reading of first person accounts from Koreans and combatants and aid workers. And I spoke to relatives. A lot of wonderful photographs were made available to me from that period - 1950-1956 - and those were given to me by a Korean newspaper in Seoul. Ruined villages, refugees streaming through a river valley, GI's and orphans and orphanages, those tiny details that you can only see in a picture.

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

But I would argue that a longer war it's more difficult to keep records than a shorter war.