Ralph Eugene Meatyard
[Photographer, b. 1925, Normal, Illinois, d. 1972, Lexington, Kentucky.]
I want to get people to read stone, tree, so forth & so on through the construction of the picture, to lead them to these things exactly as if it were written out on a page. I think it can be done.
André Breton
[Artist, writer, editor, and critic, b. 1896, Tinchebray, France, d. 1966, Paris, France.]
And when will all the books that are worth anything stop being illustrated with drawings and appear only with photographs?
(1925)
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)
[Writer, photographer, mathematician, and logician, b. 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, England, d. 1898, Guildford, Surrey, England.]
The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
The newspaper photograph is the stepchild of photography. It’s cut at random to fit into an article, captioned, and turned into an illustration of the text.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
[Writer, b. 1804, Salem, Massachusetts, d. 1864, Plymouth, New Hampshire.]
[I wish] there was something in the intellectual world analogous to the Daguerreotype... in the visible—something which should print off our deepest, subtlest, and delicatest thoughts and feelings, as minutely and accurately as the above-mentioned instrument paints the various aspects of Nature.
(1839)
Beaumont Newhall
[Photographer, writer, and historian, b. 1908, Lynn, Massachusetts, d. 1993, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer—a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.
Hugo Ball
[Author, artist, and poet, b. 1886, Pirmasens, Germany, d. 1927, Sant'Abbondio, Switzerland.]
The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?
