Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
The photograph, after all, is just a photograph. Words will determine its meaning and status.
Louise Lawler
[Artist, b. 1947, Bronxville, New York, lives in New York.]
A photograph is one kind of information. It can be made more or less explicit with a text. You are told “some things” about “something”; never everything. By being “told” you hopefully are more aware that someone is “telling”; choices have been made and can continue to be made.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Art is an interpreter of the inexpressible, and therefore it seems a folly to try to convey its meaning afresh by means of words.
Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
Think in terms of images and words. They can be mighty powerful when they are fitted together properly.
Tod Papageorge
[Photographer, b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]
If your pictures are not good enough, you aren’t reading enough.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
When you see a group of images together, they create their own context, and, in a sense, their own text.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
I arrived at writing [on photographs] from a frustration with the medium. I was frustrated by the silence of the still photograph.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.
