James Nachtwey Quotations

If Im feeling outraged, grief, disbelief, frustration, sympathy, that gets channeled through me and into my pictures and hopefully transmitted to the viewer.

Do we really need another picture of Paris Hilton or Naomi Campbell?

I want my pictures to cut through political abstractions... and make a connection on a human level.

Photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.

None of the editors I've worked with have ever asked me to pull my punches. They've never asked me to give them anything other than my own interpretation of events.

I dont think tragic situations are necessarily devoid of beauty.

If you make an honest picture of war, it will be an antiwar photograph.

I began after college, about 1972. I began to teach myself photography. I went to work for a local newspaper for four years as a kind of basic training.

Starvation and disease are the original weapons of mass destruction. When you burn fields and kill animals, people are left vulnerable.

I want to record history through the destiny of individuals who often belong to the least wealthy classes. I do not want to show war in general, nor history with a capital H, but rather the tragedy of a single man, of a family.