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.
James Agee
[Writer, b. 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee, d. 1955, New York.]
If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would all be photographs.
(In the 1941 book with photographs by Walker Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
)
Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.
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.
Neil Postman
[Writer and media critic, b. 1931, New York, d. 2003, Queens, New York.]
You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.
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.
Frederick Sommer
[Photographer, b. 1905, Angri, Italy, d. 1999, Prescott, Arizona.]
Words represent images: nothing can be said for which there is no image.
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.”
