Jerome Liebling quotes:

My sympathies have always been with the everyday people... the center of my photography.

These days it seems that physical truth can easily be rearranged, rethought, or re-created outright. Any image can be made pristine, all the warts can be removed. But returning to the source of a thing - the real source - means the photographer has to watch, dig, listen for voices, sniff the smells, and have many doubts. My life in photography has been lived as a skeptic.

For me photography had an immediacy... I was trying to resolve certain issues. What was fair or unfair about how people lived, and how they had to live? I thought the most penetrating and most immediate way to get to some of those questions was through photography.

My photographs tried to find the politicians at their most wary, most vulnerable, and perhaps most truthful moments. I wanted the photographs to reveal the person through stance and stare, when he or she was most reflective or off guard, in order to measure the person and event unfolding.