"In [news] photographs, the priority seems to be on getting good shots, so to speak, shots of the news moment. And it's a sort of unwillingness to come to terms with what is going on down there in a systematic way. I think photographers sometimes are very short-sighted in looking at causes. They are interested in the more dramatic symptoms of the problem rather than the cause of the problem. There's this sort of refusal to look at patterns. I would opt much more for telling the story with lots of images and text that tries to relate what has been going on in El Salvador with what has been going on in the last 50 years in the world--things like the decline of neo-colonialism and the rise of independent nation-states."-Richard Cross, Photographers of the Vanguard, 1981

"Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked-- and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record. An Image became a record of how X had seen Y." -John Berger, Ways of Seeing

"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."-Joseph Conrad, 1897

“After a long silence, Yazzie turned to Worth and asked, in Navajo, ‘Will making movies do the sheep any harm?’ Worth replied no, to which Yazzie responded, ‘Will making movies do the sheep any good?’ Again, Worth replied no.
[Yazzie] thought this over, then, looking around at us he said, ‘Then why make movies?” —Sol Worth, 1972

"We do not demand that a field ethnologist write with the skill of a novelist or a poet, although we do indeed accord disproportionate attention to those who do. It is equally inappropriate to demand that filmed behavior have the earmarks of a work of art. We can be grateful when it does, and we can cherish those rare combinations of artistic ability and scientific fidelity that have given us great ethnographic films. But I believe that we have absolutely no right to waste our breath and our resources demanding them. That we do is the unfortunate outcome of both the European tradition of the overriding importance of originality in the arts and the way in which the camera has replaced the artist's brush and so developed film as an art form." -Margaret Mead, Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words

"That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph."-Susan Sontag, On Photography

“This film is research. The context of this research is Paris. It is not a fictional film. This research concerns real life. This is not a documentary film. This research does not aim to describe; it is an experiment lived by its authors and its actors. This is not strictly speaking, a sociological film. Sociological film researches society. It is an ethnological film in the strong sense of the term; it studies mankind.”-Edgar Morin, synopis for authorization to film Chronicle of a Summer with Jean Rouch

"I once asked the Dogon why they have 5-day weeks, and they asked me how many fingers I had."-Jean Rouch, 1991

"Most importantly, local knowledge would be digested through institutions of learning in Europe and only then re-served as qualified knowledge about Indies "customs," "cultures," and "peoples," ideally shorn of touch and taste and no longer local at all."-Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 2009

"Aura becomes visible only as it disappears. Auratic experience cannot be 'salvaged' or resurrected in modernity, but it can be represented in allegorical form." -Catherine Russel, Experimental Ethnography, 1999

"...the story privileges a 'logic of ambiguity'... It 'turns' the frontier into a crossing, and a river into a bridge. It recounts inversions and displacements: the door that closes is precisely what may be opened; the river is what makes passage possible; the tree is what marks the stages of advance; the picket fence is an ensemble of interstices through which one's glances pass." -Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1988

"The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become a mere representation." -Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967



"The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." -Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967

"If this ain't the way it was, it's the way it should have been."-Disclaimer from the film, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, 1972

"Although constructing the ethnographic present is no longer considered a viable idea, the notion of asking people to create an image of their lives that represents their view of themselves is very much a part of contemporary practice." -Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology, 2000

"Ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic position, that at the very moment when it begins to put its workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity."-Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

"If social analysts realize that they cannot be perfectly 'clean,' they no more should become as 'dirty' as possible than airline pilots, invoking the limitations of human fallibility, should blind their eyes." -Renato Resaldo, Culture and Truth, 1998

"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." -Bertolt Brecht