The people who make up today's thriving photography community are our eyes to the world. Whether they are established artists and journalists or passionate emerging vocalists, they inform us, inspire us, amaze us, they put our world in the broader context of history.

But this community also faces major challenges - falling sales, increased competition, and a fragile trust in its mission to inform photographers. These factors too often can cause those of us in this community, photographers and retouchers, to lose sight of what drives us.

For this post, as the final editor of TIME LightBox, I asked 13 of my colleagues - some of the many photographers and photo editors who have influenced and transmitted inspired me in my more than ten years of working in this industry - answering these key questions:
Why are they doing this? Why do they wake up every morning ready to take pictures, edit and publish them? Why is photography important to them and more broadly to all of us?

This is their answer.

Kathy Ryan, Director of Photography, New York Times Magazine

Photo is the lingua franca of our times. Everyone has hundreds or even thousands of them in their pocket. In the case of weightlessness, they shift weights when the argument is:
What happened here? The image is not aged or distorted. The strings of a great photographer never go out of tune.

This is why we need photographers. They are the ones who arrange all the chaos of the world into images that shed light on the freedom of life. They are witnesses and artists capable of distilling the chaos and beauty that surrounds us. They draw our attention to the things we miss in our daily lives, and they draw our attention to events and people far removed from our part of the universe. When they direct our eyes and hearts correctly and honestly, we know what we know differently and better. Photographers teach us to look back, to look harder. Look through their eyes.

Ruddy Roye, Photographer

I take pictures because I see them. I shoot because otherwise, I don't know who would. Activism is considered a dirty word. I shoot because I find peace in being particularly active and a strong supporter of a cause.

How would you define “cause”? According to Webster, it is "a person or thing that acts, happens, or exists in such a way that a particular thing happens.