Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera’s eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.
In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of “spiritual” feelings and “critical” discontent, is insanity.
The fact that illness is associated with the poor – who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one’s midst – reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.
The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
The white race is the cancer of human history.
Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.
Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.
A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.
When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
Experiences aren’t pornographic; only images and representations – structures of the imagination – are.