Visual Narratives Quotes

For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times, those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

My life is making movies. I like storytelling, and I've got a lot of stories that are stored up in my head that I hope to get out before my time is up.

I don't think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures.

I feel blessed every day when I'm working on these paintings... the first artist to ever go to another world and try to tell stories that people care about.

Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.

I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.

Looking into my future, I don't always want to be in front of the camera. I want to be behind the camera and bring to life those family members of mine or people that I knew or the kids I grew up. I want people to know the different facets of black people, brown people, all people.

While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

The 'Barnaby' books were always intended to be graphic novels.

And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.

Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.

I didn't know how to write comics. I had to teach myself.

Since 1970, I've been using text and ephemera as well as photographs in order to tell stories of one kind or another. There's a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness. The photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them.

Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.

Remember picture books are the closest form of writing to a poem. Even though they don't have to rhyme, they must be poetic. They must be written so the worst actress can read with comfort and expression.

I hadn't thought specifically about doing graphic novels until a couple of my friends got contracts for them. Then I started picturing how various of my stories or poems would work in an illustrated format and thinking how cool that would be.

I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel. How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.

Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.

I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.

I like watching films that can play in any language because they're essentially silent.

One of the best things that happened for me as a playwright is becoming a comic-book writer.

It's very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don't make portraiture ideological in some way.

I feel lucky to be able to work with such great filmmakers on such wonderful stories.