William Eggleston
[Photographer, b. 1939, Memphis, Tennessee, lives in Memphis.]
Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it’s just about impossible to follow up with words. They don’t have anything to do with each 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
)
Olafur Eliasson
[Artist, b. 1967, Copenhagen, Denmark, lives in Berlin, Germany.]
Photographs have a relevance for things that cannot be said.
Tod Papageorge
[Photographer, b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]
If your pictures are not good enough, you aren’t reading enough.
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.
Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.
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.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Exile is a series of photographs without texts.
