Frederick Wiseman Quotes

Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don't understand images: they don't understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them.

You see a picture and you understand perfectly, immediately, the basic thing that's happening. It's probably more accessible because we are in a culture of images. People are used to seeing stories that way. They understand looking at pictures.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

We do not need to have a way to talk clearly about other people's images.

I don't really like reading: I like seeing and touching images.

One way to test a picture's integrity is to turn it upside down - a technique used not only by connoisseurs but also by artists trying to see their work with a fresh eye.

A picture is what it is and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.

You know how misleading an image is. You see an image in the newspaper, if they left the caption off, good luck knowing what's going on. There is something inherently misleading about images, so they need annotation.

Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

The picture itself is a document. How do you mean? We're looking at a document. It gives you clues.

The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means - allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece - when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there's an instant "Aha!".

Drawing is not only a way to come up with pictures: drawing is a way to educate your eye to understand visual information, organizing it into a more hierarchical way, a more economical way. When you see something, if you draw often and frequently, you examine a room very differently.

I try to get out of an image's way in order to let it articulate what is hidden.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

I'm interested in aesthetics, in the way things look, in finding something in an image that maybe people haven't seen.

Not only is writing more important than ever, but visual literacy is vital. We don't teach enough design, art, visual things. We have to recognize what we're seeing. It matters if you send someone a cluttered design. It matters more than ever.

Pictures are so good at giving people information that they're not looking for.

I'm fascinated with what an audience will take away from an image.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.

The thing is that pictures are everywhere. The question is what we don't see, and why don't we see so much. I just see it.

Pictures often sit inside of pictures, but the edges of pictures and objects are rarely subjected to serious challenge; we are presented with distinct, whole pictures and objects.

The reasons why images are so primal and people immediately relate to it is that we are exquisitely engineered to interpret information that is arrayed in two dimensions. That's our eyesight. That's how our eye-brain system works. So it immediately feels to us when we look at an image like we have extended our senses.

All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion…What you see is what you see.