Magnum Quotes

“The problem with photography is that everybody can do it. Everybody has a camera and therefore everybody feels they can give advice.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“The profession of photography is anti-elitist. There are very few professions where even when you are at the top, a household name, you might still be standing on a draughty street corner with your feet getting wet and cold, waiting for something to happen. At that moment you are on the same level as a homeless person, standing on a street corner, begging. In most professions, the higher up you go, the more likely you are to go around in a chauffeur-driven car.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“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.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“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.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“A balance must be established between these two worlds, the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“I prefer to be noticed, some day, first for my ideas and second for my good eye . . .”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“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.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“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.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History

“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.”
― Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History