Alan Schaaf Quotes

I feel like I can communicate much better using images than words.

The language of the moment or, as it were, the language of the order in which we live, is the image. I felt that if I wanted to commune with the public, I should best do so through the language of image. It's a conscious embrace of a contradiction.

Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.

I trust the pictures to tell what I want to say.

It doesn't matter if you can't speak the same language. If you have pictures, or better still, if you can draw things, then you can communicate anything to anyone.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

I did television for a very long time, but if you're on television, words don't count. What the eye sees beats the words. If you switch sides, from radio to television, you learn that the wordiness that you learn on the radio is useless or not nearly as powerful, and you have to learn to trust that the eye will just beat the ear.

There's no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.

I think it's good to have switched to a much more visual world and that people are not all that interested in words.

The work should talk.

Images have a unique power to impart that which is beyond words.

Image is an international language.

The style depends on the subject.

I sometimes feel that a pattern is almost a fashion statement in itself.

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

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

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

No matter what your cultural sophistication or what language you speak, everyone can understand images.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

The combination of pictures and words together can be really effective, and I began to realise in my career that unless I wrote my own words, then my message was diluted.

Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.

Talking with pictures and making memories is universally appealing.

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.

Film is anti-language.

Visual storytelling utilizes both language and art to pass on the essence of who we are.