William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a “photography.”
Exile is a series of photographs without texts.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is
change the caption.
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.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The image freezes an endless number of possibilities; words determine a single certainty... this is why all news photographs are captioned.
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.
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.
John Baldessari
[Artist, b. 1931, National City, California, lives in Venice, California.]
Photos should suggest a word(s) and vice versa. They should be equal and interchangeable.
