Frederick Sommer
[Photographer, b. 1905, Angri, Italy, d. 1999, Prescott, Arizona.]
Words represent images: nothing can be said for which there is no image.
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.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Exile is a series of photographs without texts.
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.]
I tend to think of words as substitutes for images. I can never seem to figure out what one does that the other doesn’t do.
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.
Josef Koudelka
[Photographer, b. 1938, Biskovice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, lives in Paris.]
I don’t like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.
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.
