Olafur Eliasson
[Artist, b. 1967, Copenhagen, Denmark, lives in Berlin, Germany.]
Photographs have a relevance for things that cannot be said.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Exile is a series of photographs without texts.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is
change the caption.
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.
John Loengard
[Photographer, editor, and critic, b. 1934, New York, lives in New York.]
To understand photographs, I believe you have to understand that the camera just shows what it shows. Photography may be moving, exciting, compassionate, or clever. But the camera cannot lie. Neither can a slide rule, a balance. If you want to lie, you have to do it with words.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
I arrived at writing [on photographs] from a frustration with the medium. I was frustrated by the silence of the still photograph.
Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.
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.
