Documentary Art Quotes

I'm an artist and a journalist. I travel around the world very often for 'Vice Magazine,' and I draw and I write about prisons, about conflict zones.

To us, the difference between the #‎ photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #‎ photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.

There's one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own, maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. 'The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 1963' consists of a grid of 32 small color photographs depicting just what the title says.

Film is a tool of change.

I've always wanted to make Australian art interesting. To get a different audience watching art documentaries would be great.

That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.

A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.

Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character.

I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.

I've always considered myself a nonfiction artist.

I'm kind of a twisted social documentary photographer.

As far as the balance between being a journalist, being an artist, being a storyteller - documentary filmmakers are all three of those things. The balance between them is affected by the film itself, the topic of the film.

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.

You make documentaries because you love doing it; it's the only sane reason to make documentaries.

I don't want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, 'Hey people, hey people!'

I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.

I hope that not only my documentaries, but everybody's documentaries, last. It will really confuse historians in the next century, because they'll have, in addition to all the print material, they'll have all these pictures to look at.