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.
Eudora Welty
[Writer, b. 1909, Jackson, Mississippi, d. 2001, Jackson.]
I’m not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don’t mean that they are related arts, because they’re not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It’s about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
A photograph is worth a thousand words, provided it is accompanied by only ten words.
Camille Paglia
[Writer, b. 1947, Endicott, New York, lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.]
The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
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.
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.
Douglas Coupland
[Writer, b. 1961, Baden-Söllingen, Germany, lives in Vancouver, Canada.]
I tried to think of a witty play on “Every picture tells a thousand words,” but then the whole word/picture thing collapsed on me.
Olafur Eliasson
[Artist, b. 1967, Copenhagen, Denmark, lives in Berlin, Germany.]
Photographs have a relevance for things that cannot be said.
