Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.
Don DeLillo
[Writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in New York.]
I am not an opponent of the proliferation of pictures in our culture, I am just trying to understand its impact. I like photography, I like to look at photographs and paintings. However, the difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.
Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]
Photography is written; photography has a narrative structure, it is articulated like any other system of signs. An individual photograph is, for me, a line of prose that should come before and come after others with the intention of stating something complex.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
Formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination.
John Heartfield (Helmut Franz Joseph Herzfeld)
[Artist, b. 1891, Munich, Germany, d. 1968, Berlin.]
There are a lot of things that got me into working with photos. The main thing is that I saw both what was being said and not being said with photos in the newspapers… I found out how you can fool people with photos, really fool them… You can lie and tell the truth by putting the wrong title or wrong captions under them, and that’s roughly what was being done…
Paul Valéry
[Writer and poet, b. 1871, Sète, France, d. 1945, Paris.]
From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.
Ayn Rand (Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum)
[Writer, b. 1905, Saint Petersburg, Russia, d. 1982, New York.]
Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.
Eliot Porter
[Photographer, b. 1901, Winnetka, Illinois, d. 1990, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
Photographs are believed more than words; thus they can be used persuasively to show people who have never taken the trouble to look what is there.
