A Quote by Susan Meiselas
What worries me is that we want to close down our relationship to the world at large. In other words, people's instincts are overwhelmed by the amount of images, or they can't distinguish anymore between Rwanda or Bosnia or Somalia.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
I don't recognize my people anymore. I feel Somalia is lost. There is no Somalia. It is just a name.
When I do only images, people don't connect with the images because the images are too weird to understand. But when I explain the weird images with straight words, then all of a sudden there is a tension between the two that the audience wants to see.
The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.
For many people in the U.N., the 1990s was the worst decade the organization experienced. This was the decade of Somalia, Srebrenica, of Rwanda and so forth, and yet the reality is, during this period, although there were these awful conflicts, the overall number of wars had gone down.
The reverse process is extremely important to me - that artistic images can inspire to words and different myths, and that in certain cultures this process has been the normal relation between images and words.
At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, all we really want is to be close to somebody. So this thing where we all keep our distance and pretend not to care about each other, it's usually a load of bull. So we pick and choose who we want to remain close to, and once we've chosen those people, we tend to stick close by. No matter how much we hurt them. The people that are still with you at the end of the day, those are the ones worth keeping. And sure, sometimes close can be too close. But sometimes, that invasion of personal space, it can be exactly what you need.
I think to a certain extent in Bosnia and among the Hutus in Rwanda and also among the Tutsis in Rwanda who then took revenge on the Hutus, there is a sense of being swept up and a sense that the society in which they live has gone mad.
Relationship between human beings is based on the image-forming, defensive mechanism. In our relationships each of us builds an image about the other, and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves.
There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you "Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?" - Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent. Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn't. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
A relationship is an imaginative act, it's an act of creation. Someone said to me the other day that a relationship between a person and a kid is unconditional; but the relationship between adults, to each other, is conditional, in a sense. But that condition can be the best kind.
It depends on the situation. I mean, on one hand there's the argument that people should be left alone on the other hand, there's the argument to wade in a stop slaughters in places like Bosnia and Kosovo and what we probably should have done in Rwanda.
I don't want to go crazy pretending to be someone all the time. But at the same time, if I have the ability to influence people, and we have X amount of energy in the day, it's not even our option anymore - it's our duty to do something positive in the world.
I didn't want anyone getting close to me. I pushed people away. Built a wall around my heart to keep them out. I let one person take down the bricks, and I suppose it was a good idea, but, sometimes, he hurts me too. And it hurts so much worse then any other hurt I've felt because he is one of the very few that matter anymore.
Yet, only years after the Nazi-era, millions were sent to their deaths in places such as Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, and the world once again took too long to act.
Before I became a SEAL, I'd done humanitarian work around the world - with refugee families in Bosnia, with unaccompanied children in Rwanda, with kids who lost limbs to land mines in Cambodia.
We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.
Related Authors
Amanda de Cadenet Quotes
English
Photographer
Annie Leibovitz Quotes
American
Photographer
Ansel Adams Quotes
American
Photographer
David Bailey Quotes
English
Photographer
David LaChapelle Quotes
American
Photographer
Elliott Erwitt Quotes
French
Photographer
Garry Winogrand Quotes
American
Photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
French
Photographer
Jay Maisel Quotes
American
Photographer
Lynsey Addario Quotes
American
Photographer
Martin Parr Quotes
British
Photographer
Mary Ellen Mark Quotes
American
Photographer
Nan Goldin Quotes
American
Photographer
Robert Adams Quotes
American
Photographer
Sally Mann Quotes
American
Photographer
Sam Abell Quotes
American
Photographer