Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death.
We are told we must choose – the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.
The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.
The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.
Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader’s own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart.
To travel is to shop.