What is the relationship between image and text in the visual book? How does one inform the other?

The relationship between imagery and words: there are times now when I think there are too many words and not enough pictures. I think there are huge discussions about pictures without having ever seen the picture . . . There are all these people who are writing about photography without ever having seen the object, or understanding the object, or even ever wanting to know anything about making the object, about the process, the decision-making. – Anne Tucker

[The children’s book] is the one form that uses text and image in a really easy way, it’s just enough text and the weights of the text and the image can be fairly balanced, so I thought that this is a model for how I could work with the two, use images and stories. – Alec Soth

One of our ideas for this press is that these are photobooks, they’re meant to be books in which you engage with photography. And I know that sounds simple and obvious, but what we haven’t done so far is we haven’t had any sort of explanatory text or essays in our books. This text in Seneca Ghosts is very sort of basic information, maybe some sort of context for the pictures that you’re looking at. It’s not an essay by a writer explaining the work you’re looking at and how you’re supposed to look at the work. Our idea for this press is that it’s very much about the experience of looking at photographs.

Aperture really wanted [Gossage] to have an essay in The Pond and what he came up with was a short story by his wife that seemingly has nothing to do with the book itself but the spirit of the story runs parallel to the content of the book and is very much in sympathy with the content of the book. – Ron Jude