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Quote by Horst Faas

“To get the best picture of a captured prisoner, you have to get him just as he is captured. The expression he wears then is lost forever... The human mechanism is remarkably recuperative. A half hour later, the expressions are gone, the faces have changed. The mother with the dead baby in her arms does not look griefstruck anymore, no matter what she feels.”

Quote by Horst Faas

Author

Horst Faas was a German journalist renowned for his photographic coverage of the Asian warfront, particularly during the Vietnam War. Serving as a photographer for The New York Times, his exceptional work earned him a Pulitzer Prize. His photographs captured the harsh realities of war and the resilience of humanity. more

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“I try to express with the camera what the story is, to get to the heart of the story with picture. In battle I look at things first in terms of people, second in terms of strategies or casualties... To tell a story, you don't photograph one hundred dead civilians to prove there were one hundred dead civilians. You photograph one dead civilian with an expression on his face that says, This is what it's like if you're a dead civilian in Vietnam.”

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“In my work, the information is the least important part. It's there, and the work wouldn't mean the same thing without it, but it isn't structured around the information. The most interesting part to me is the visual play... looking at this little universe of representation that I can make out of the world.”

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“For me, looking at small images somehow recreates the experience of looking through a viewfinder.... At this size they're edible. You don't just scan them. You take them in all at once.”

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“I was trying to match my mental image of the world, rather than the world itself, and mental images of objects aren't full of detail. If you think house, you're going to get something very general... Dropping detail made the photographs more general, like mental images.”

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“I have always thought that the photographer does artistic work and that art consists of working with fictional premises.”

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“There are religions in which the representation of the world is banned as an usurpation of the power of a God, creator of all things. It is very possible that photography is a trick of the devil and each shot is a sin.”

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“Photography... has lived under the tyranny of its subject matter: the object has exercised an almost total domination.”

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“The heart [of my work], the quintessential, remains the questioning of photographic truth. Be careful, be critical, doubt, and filter the information you receive.”

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“Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.”

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“Photography mirrored the [nineteenth century] will towards rigor, towards defining details, the need for miniscule description, the long-distance optics, for technology at the service of truth, for concepts of credibility, of objectivity, the need to archive, for the consolidation of institutions like the museum, in short, towards a need to control memory.”