A Quote by Duane Michals

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.

Duane Michals

Quote Topics

Anyway Because Birds Cliche Dodo Bird Got Great Lot Originally Photograph Photographers Photographs Photography Thousand Thousand Words Words Worth Writing

Quote Author

Duane Michals
American - Photographer
Born: February 18, 1932

Saudi Arabia is so conservative. At first there were photographs of women I took that I couldn't publish - of women without their abayas. So I started writing out little anecdotes about things I couldn't photograph and wove it in with a more obscure picture and called it "moments that got away". I realised these worked as well as the photographs by themselves. There are a lot of photographers who feel the story is all in the photographs but I really believe in weaving in complementary words with the pictures.

Olivia Arthur

The word "photography" can be interpreted as "writing with light" or "drawing with light." Some photographers are producing beautiful photographs by drawing with light.. Some other photographers are trying to tell something with their photographs. They are writing with light.

Philippe Halsman

Most photographers go and photograph something that they see, that exists, and that somebody else has created - they document it. But fashion photographers have to create what they're going to photograph. We have to go into the thought and build it up, get a girl, get a guy, get a situation, get the house, get the decor. It's the meaning of the word photography: "writing with light."

Mario Testino

If a picture is worth a thousand words, photographers are worth a million.

Tupac Shakur

I never had any intention nor interest in being an artist, but when I made work I realized that this was my language. What I had to say needed to be said in this way. I always loved taking photographs - but never considered myself a photographer. I have tremendous respect for photographers. I do use a camera and a photo as a basis for a lot of my work, but I use it as a means to attain an image to work from. The actual photography in my work is a monochromatic photograph. I'll photograph something and extract a color that will then be the background for a painting.

Paul Rusconi

A photograph is worth a thousand words, provided it is accompanied by only ten words.

Edward Steichen

If I photograph you I don't have you, I have a photograph of you. It's got its own thing. That's really what photography, still photography, is about.

Garry Winogrand

Here's the beauty of a camera: you don't have to come up with words for what you're looking at... Maybe another angle is needed sometimes. When we're burned out from writing, we can photograph or draw, look at the world in a different way, and photographers could try writing what they see.

Barbara Abercrombie

Photography is a big part of my life: taking photographs, being around photographers.

Jamie Hince

Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography’s limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating.

Taryn Simon

You've got a number of things that take place that are peculiar to still photography. One: how a picture looks - what you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks. In other words, it's responsible for the form.

Garry Winogrand

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

Susan Sontag

A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good sentence is worth a thousand windows

Mati Klarwein

A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures.

Ben Shneiderman

If you look at photographers who say, "I hate digital photography," they all use Photoshop, even if it's to make the sky just a little more blue than it was. Manipulation is very discrete and because it's so discrete nobody cares about it anymore. People accept manipulated photographs, I think.