James Nachtwey

“If you want to connect with people who are in distress and great grief and scared, you need to do it in a certain way. I move kind of slow. I talk kind of slow. I let them know that I respect them.”

“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.”

“I'm half deaf. I have nerve damage and a constant ringing in both of my ears, and there are certain times and conditions when I can hardly hear at all.”

“I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.”

“When the truth is spoken, it doesn't need to be adorned. It just needs to be simply stated, and often it only needs to be said once.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If I'm feeling outraged, grief, disbelief, frustration, sympathy, that gets channeled through me and into my pictures and hopefully transmitted to the viewer.”

“If there is something occurring that is so bad that it could be considered a crime against humanity, it has to be transmitted with anguish, with pain, and create an impact in people - upset them, shake them up, wake them out of their everyday routine.”

“I don't think tragic situations are necessarily devoid of beauty.”

“I don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality. It's only reality as we experience it.”

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