Ben Katchor Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 are carrying these images out into the world, and we can't control how people contextualize those images no matter how virtuous our aspirations and our intentions are.

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

I'm a student of media and I've always been one. I'm fascinated by the way we make the world around us based on pictures and how can we improve our perception of this picture world.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

I'm a visual person.

It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.

I believe in a visual language that should be as strong as the written word.

I feel that every day, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magical about visual information. It's effortless; it literally pours in.

Photography helps people to see.

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

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.

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.

But with comics you're reading and assimilating an image simultaneously, instead of just reading or watching the tube.

I'm very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.

In front of the camera I look and I see visually what I've created.

Unfortunately, one picture is worth a thousand facts.

“One picture is worth a thousand words,” said an ancient Chinese; but it may take ten thousand words to validate it.