Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
The unappreciated artist is at once very humble and arrogant too. He collects and edits the world about him. This is especially important in the psychology of camera work. This is why a man who has faith, intelligence, and cultivation will show it in his work. Fine photography is literate, and it should be.
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.
Elliott Erwitt
[Photographer, b. 1928, Paris, France, lives in New York.]
Little is more irritating to me than photographers pontificating about photography or talking about their pictures in public, unless these photographers have just come back from China or the moon, or have something very particular to say, or a great new technique and approach to talk about, or are interesting and intelligent personalities. They should stick to talking through their pictures.
Larry Sultan
[Photographer, b. 1946, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2009, Greenbrae, California.]
I’ve actually thought about stopping photographing for a while and just writing, maybe that would get closer to the bone.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
[Philosopher, b. 1889, Vienna, Austria, d. 1951, Cambridge, England.]
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat itself to us inexorably.
Shimon Attie
[Photographer, b. 1957, Los Angeles, lives in New York.]
… my boundaries between past, present and future are perhaps more porous than other people’s. I think the same is true about text and image. Text is an image for me; when I use it visually I insist on it having the right quality. Words are images.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
Today, at the level of mass communications, it appears that the linguistic message is indeed present in every image: as title, caption, accompanying press article, film dialogue, comic strip balloon. Which shows it is not very accurate to talk of a civilization of the image—we are still, and more than ever, a civilization of writing, writing and speech continuing to be the full terms of the informational structure.
Paolo Pellegrin
[Photographer, b. 1964, Rome, lives in Paris.]
Photography is much like writing to me. It’s a voice.
