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.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
The meanings of words and those of pictures are at best parallel, describing two lines of thought that do not meet. If our concern is for meanings in pictures, verbal descriptions are finally gratuitous.
Andreas Gursky
[Photographer, b. 1955, Leipzig, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf.]
A word is worth a thousand images.
Lewis Hine
[Photographer, writer, and reformer, b. 1874, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, d. 1940, New York.]
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug a camera.
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.
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.
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.
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.
