Talking Pictures

People Speak About the Photographs That Speak to Them

Images flash across the screen. Photographs appear on walls, on cans, on the sides of buses, in magazines, books, newspapers, computers. We are bombarded with thousands of photographs each day: they are perhaps our major source of information, inspiration, and irritation. But what if you had to choose a single image out of that avalanche – one photograph that you couldn’t stop thinking about, that changed your ideas, your aesthetics, your perception of reality?

Seventy of the most interesting people of our era – both famous and unknown – were asked to choose that one image for Talking Pictures. The results are startling, profound, funny, and deeply revealing about our psychology and our times.

From glossy fashion photography to devastating portraits of the Holocaust, from family snapshots to the shimmering artwork of master photographers such as Irving Penn, Andre Kertesz, and Imogen Cunningham, from Life magazine photo essays to a five-hundred-times magnification of the adhesive on a Post-it, the range of images in Talking Pictures reveals not only the strength of individual obsession and the power of history and imagination, but, more importantly, the peculiar truths about ourselves and our times that can be seen only in photographs.