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. 
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