Ludwig Wittgenstein
[Philosopher, b. 1889, Vienna, Austria, d. 1951, Cambridge, England.]
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat itself to us inexorably.
Larry Sultan
[Photographer, b. 1946, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2009, Greenbrae, California.]
I’ve actually thought about stopping photographing for a while and just writing, maybe that would get closer to the bone.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
In the light of photography a new Proust has been revealed to me as a sort of mental photographer who used his own body as an ultrasensitive plate, managing thereby to capture and register in his youth thousands of impressions, and who, starting from the search for lost time, dedicated his own time to developing and printing them, thereby making visible the latent image of his entire life in that gigantic photograph constituted by À la recherche du temps perdu.
Larry Fink
[Photographer, b. 1941, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.]
The photographs speak specifics, my words attempt to swallow a general flow.
William Eggleston
[Photographer, b. 1939, Memphis, Tennessee, lives in Memphis.]
A picture is what it is and I’ve never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn’t make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they’re right there, whatever they are.
Ronald Reagan
[Actor and politician, b. 1911, Tampico, Illinois, d. 2004, Bel Air, California.]
I like photographers—you don’t ask questions.
(To a gathering of the White House News Photographers Association)
Hugo Ball
[Author, artist, and poet, b. 1886, Pirmasens, Germany, d. 1927, Sant'Abbondio, Switzerland.]
The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?
Marion Post Wolcott
[Photographer, b. 1910, Bloomfield, New Jersey, d. 1990, Santa Barbara, California.]
We were all inspired and revved up by the whole New Deal idea, and of changing things and trying to get people to understand what was going on, and what the condition of the country was. We were trying to show this graphically, because people will look at photographs when they won’t read things. We hoped that this would make an impact and change people’s ideas and their opinions.
