Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon – one that’s as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology.
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize.
Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to “care” more.
To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.
One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.
However painful they were, I needed my dreams – the metaphor for my introspection – if I was ever to be at peace.
The early Romantic sought superiority by desiring, and by desiring to desire, more intensely than others do.
The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.
Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies.
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay.
Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.
I’ve become passive. I don’t invent, I don’t yearn. I manage, I cope.
No one extraordinary appears to be entirely contemporary. People who are contemporary don’t appear at all: they are invisible.
I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall – like seeking love in a whorehouse.
A six-week trip to China in 1973 convinced me – if I needed convincing – that the autonomy of the aesthetic is something to be protected, and cherished, as indispensable nourishment to intelligence. But a decade-long residence in the 1960s, with its inexorable conversion of moral and political radicalisms into “style,” has convinced me of the perils of over- generalizing the aesthetic view of the world.
In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.
Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.
Being self-conscious. Treating one’s self as an other. Supervising oneself.
Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists.
In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding – at a distance, through the medium of photography – other people’s pain.