George W. Bush
[Politician, b. 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, lives in Dallas, Texas.]
One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The image freezes an endless number of possibilities; words determine a single certainty... this is why all news photographs are captioned.
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 Hine
[Photographer, writer, and reformer, b. 1874, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, d. 1940, New York.]
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug a camera.
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 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.
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
[Writer, b. 1835, Hannibal, Missouri, d. 1910, Redding, Connecticut.]
Ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand presses are saying the good word for me all the time… Then that trivial little kodak, that a child can carry in its pocket, gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb!
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
Whoever came up first with that saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” didn’t understand the first thing about either one.
