“It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.”

Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact – to use Walt Whitman’s definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.

Wherever there is disaster, the newsman is there. If he cannot find disaster, he searches for the odd and the peculiar, the exotic and the unfamiliar.

Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer – a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.

The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form.

The direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation, and discovery of the world of man and of nature.

The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy.

The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.

More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication.

We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

His photographs, seen by millions, make momentary events and strange occurrences all over the world our common property.

The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he’s regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship.

That means there’s also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.

And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.

An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.

Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

Ultimately a historian has to put together a cohesive work.

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.