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.
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...
Peter Bunnell
[Writer and photo historian, b. 1937, Poughkeepsie, New York, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
In a sense, photographs are highly literary, and the photographer, like the writer, has to be both a master of craft and a visionary. Patient accumulation of facts and then speculation about their meaning is the nature of authorship in both mediums.
Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
A great photograph needs no explanation; it functions by suggestion. There is no need to be explicit.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
In the light of photography a new Proust has been revealed to me as a sort of mental photographer who used his own body as an ultrasensitive plate, managing thereby to capture and register in his youth thousands of impressions, and who, starting from the search for lost time, dedicated his own time to developing and printing them, thereby making visible the latent image of his entire life in that gigantic photograph constituted by À la recherche du temps perdu.
Marion Post Wolcott
[Photographer, b. 1910, Bloomfield, New Jersey, d. 1990, Santa Barbara, California.]
We were all inspired and revved up by the whole New Deal idea, and of changing things and trying to get people to understand what was going on, and what the condition of the country was. We were trying to show this graphically, because people will look at photographs when they won’t read things. We hoped that this would make an impact and change people’s ideas and their opinions.
Ronald Reagan
[Actor and politician, b. 1911, Tampico, Illinois, d. 2004, Bel Air, California.]
I like photographers—you don’t ask questions.
(To a gathering of the White House News Photographers Association)
Barbara Kruger
[Artist, b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
I worked with someone else’s photos; I cropped them in whatever way I wanted and put words on top of them. I knew how to do it with my eyes closed. Why couldn’t that be my art?
