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.
Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
If you take photos, don’t speak, don’t write, don’t analyze yourself, and don’t answer any questions.
Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I’m proposing to you that photography is a language on its own, which is that when you look at images you do derive ideas; and I’m also proposing to you that you can derive ideas without going through words. So I’m forcing you to really look. And this process of looking, it’s like a new set of ideas that are being proposed to you.
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.
Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
Think in terms of images and words. They can be mighty powerful when they are fitted together properly.
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
Even the uncaptioned “art” photograph is invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other.
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
)
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
When you see a group of images together, they create their own context, and, in a sense, their own text.
