Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
Writers can reflect before they put words on paper... As photographers, we don’t have the luxury of this reflective time... We can’t redo our shoot once we’re back at the hotel. Our job consists of observing reality with help of our camera (which serves as a kind of sketchbook), of fixing reality in a moment, but not manipulating it, neither during the shoot nor in the darkroom later on. These types of manipulation are always noticed by anyone with a good eye.
Neil Postman
[Writer and media critic, b. 1931, New York, d. 2003, Queens, New York.]
The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
Of all the structures of information, the photograph appears as the only one that is exclusively constituted and occupied by a ‘denoted’ message, a message which totally exhausts its mode of existence. In front of a photograph, the feeling of ‘denotation,’ or, if one prefers, of analogical plentitude, is so great that the description of a photograph is literally impossible...
Clarence John Laughlin
[Photographer, b. 1905, Lake Charles, Louisiana, d. 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana.]
There is nothing, under present conditions, that can be more easily and exactly reproduced than a technically good black-and-white photograph, and it is utter rot to burden those interested in them with irrelevant biographical trivia and pet longwinded theory.
Lorna Simpson
[Artist, b. 1960, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
I started to concentrate more upon how the viewer looks at photographs... I would insert my own text or my own specific reading of the image to give the viewer something they might not interpret or surmise, due to their “educated” way of looking at images, and reading them for their emotional, psychological, and/or sociological values. So I would start to interject these things that the photograph would not speak of and that I felt needed to be revealed, but that couldn’t be revealed from just looking at an image.
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.
Josef Koudelka
[Photographer, b. 1938, Biskovice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, lives in Paris.]
I try to be a photographer. I cannot talk. I am not interested in talking. If I have anything to say, it may be found in my images.
