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.
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
)
David Wojnarowicz
[Artist and activist, b. 1954, Redbank, New Jersey, d. 1990, New York.]
To me, photographs are like words and I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
All, or most, photographs have many faces. The face desired is revealed by the caption.
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.
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.
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.
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.
