Pipilotti Rist
[Artist, b. 1962, Reinthal, Switzerland, lives in Zurich and Los Angeles.]

 Fifty years ago, the spoken word reigned, but during the last fifty years, the power has gone over to pictures. 

Jacques-Henri Lartigue
[Photographer, b. 1894, Courbevoie, France, d. 1986, Nice, France.]

 To talk about photos rather than making them seems idiotic to me. It’s as though I went on and on about a woman I adored instead of making love to her. 

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. 

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. 

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) 

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. 

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. 
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