Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Only that which narrates can make us understand.
Clement Greenberg
[Critic, b. 1909, New York, d. 1994, New York.]
The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.
Josef Koudelka
[Photographer, b. 1938, Biskovice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, lives in Paris.]
I don’t like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories.
Eliot Porter
[Photographer, b. 1901, Winnetka, Illinois, d. 1990, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.
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.
James Welling
[Photographer, b. 1951, Hartford, Connecticut, lives in Los Angeles.]
There is a narrative behind every image. I often imagine being able to see the photographer standing behind the camera, or perhaps crouching or running with it.
Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
I think that there isn’t a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability... They do not tell stories—they show you what something looks like. To a camera.
