Quotes about Reportage

Paul Salopek

My role is to bear witness and to bring back what people see and tell you.

He had just returned from Darfur in which there was a genocide and ethnic cleansing in progress with the Arabs murdering the Africans in the province with the condonation and assistance of the Sudanese government.

Annie Leibovitz

I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.

Peter Balakian

Seen from the beginning of the 21st century, the reportage of the Armenian Genocide remains a seminal event. It was the first time Americans were confronted with unfathomable numbers of the murder of innocent, unarmed civilians.

The Christian Armenians, a minority in Turkey and its lands, were discriminated against like other non Muslim minorities in the Ottoman Empire. But during the Turkish War with Russia and WWI, some Armenians defected and served on the Russian side. Many Turkish citizens took revenge on Armenians by means of murder and torture. Soon, the extermination of the Armenians became the official “Young Turk” government policy. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed outright, and about an equal number were “deported” to special areas. Many died of malnutrition along the forced march of Ethnic Cleansing. Others were murdered as they were deported. No one knows exactly how many Armenians were killed with estimates ranging from ½ million to 4 million. This was the first genocide of the 20th century. Modern Turkish leaders however, are in denial about the Armenian deaths. They claim that there was a war and food was scarce; the only Armenians killed, the claimed were proven Russian agents. They further claim that the Armenian behavior was in large part responsible for the forced deportations because of their lack of patriotism and unwillingness to help the Turkish authorities identify the Russian agents. Most Turks today are unaware of the Armenian Genocide as nothing is taught about the massacres in schools or other institutions. It is against the law in Turkey to even have an intellectual study of the Turkish behavior towards the Armenians, much less publish anything about it.

Greig Fraser

A perfect example is 'Zero Dark Thirty.' That's the closest thing to reportage that I've done because a lot of that was shooting from the hip and found images and giving the actors a lot of freedom to explore the space and not have to repeat their actions twice and basically workshop on-camera.

Norman Spinrad

All fiction is lies – if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

Ovid

The mind, conscious of rectitude, laughed to scorn the falsehood of report.

Samuel Beckett

An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.

Jean-Luc Godard

Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.

Annie Leibovitz

I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism.

Pankaj Mishra

Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which 'From the Ruins of Empire' was.

Will Self

Many of my works fall into the category of 'Zeitgeist novels'. Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.

Billy Bragg

So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time.

Laura Hillenbrand

My work was entirely nonfiction.

Stephen Greenblatt

A couple of years ago I picked up New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "The Heart That Bleeds," which is reportage from Latin America in the 1990s. You can predict that some books will give you a thrill, but you can't predict the books that will hit you hard. It is a little bit like falling in love.

Ann Nocenti

Comics shouldn't be 'tools' for anyone's agenda except for the characters. And I am speaking only of super hero action comics. I love many of the alternative comics that are like journalistic stories. Documentary comics, a mix of reportage and fiction. Those are just great.

Reportage Quotes