Robert Doisneau Quotes

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

We live in an image society. Speeches are not what anybody cares about; what they care about is the picture.

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.

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

We live in a visual world now.

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.

Of course, it gave the studio an enormous power, because I don't know any other place who had that skill with images to communicate with. And the need of these kinds of images are even greater now than they ever were because we are losing our life symbols.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

But I think we're also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They've seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There's so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

What is it about animation, graphics, illustrations, that create meaning? And this is an important question to ask and answer because the more we understand how the brain creates meaning, the better we can communicate, and, I also think, the better we can think and collaborate together.

I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.

If I really believe that visual representation and narrative are ways to convey important, complex ideas, and if the world is gravitating toward this form, then geez, I better do it myself. I want to do it myself.

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.

Because even very young people are expert readers of pictures, you can convey very complex and subtle messages through pictures that you'd need loads of words to explain. Making a picture book is also a bit like making your own film - and you can make anything you want happen, however impossible!

I've always been so surprised by how people interpret my photos in context.

I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.

I do all my speeches in pictures. If I wrote words, I'd get locked in on them.

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

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

It's a visual world and people respond to visuals.

Around the time I began starving, in the early eighties, the visual image had begun to supplant text as culture's primary mode of communication, a radical change because images work so differently than words: They're immediate, they hit you at levels way beneath intellect, they come fast and furious.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'

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

I'm a visual person.