Nancy Newhall
[Writer, curator, and historian, b. 1908, Lynn, Massachusetts, d. 1974, on the Snake River, Idaho.]
Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records will be kept in images and sounds.
At birth we begin to discover that shapes, sounds, lights, and textures have meaning. Long before we learn to talk, sounds and images form the world we live in. All our lives, that world is more immediate than words and difficult to articulate. Photography, reflecting those images with uncanny accuracy, evokes their associations and our instant conviction. The art of the photographer lies in using those connotations, as a poet uses the connotations of words and a musician the tonal connotations of sounds.