To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. With him I have neither, neither privacy or passion. Neither the heightening of self which is won by privacy and loneliness, nor the splendid heroic beautiful loss of self that accompanies passion.
You have to create your own space which has a lot of silence in it and a lot of books.
In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.
Look, what I want is to be fully present in my life – to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself in your life, giving full attention to the world, which includes you. You are not the world, the world is not identical to you, but you’re in it and paying attention to it. That’s what a writer does – a writer pays attention to the world.
My love wants to incorporate her totally, to eat her. My love is selfish.
I know I’m not myself with people, but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.
Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.
What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such – of what lies beyond the human and the made – and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.
Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it.
Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate – and, therefore, improve – our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.
Elites presuppose masses.
All memory is individual, unreproducible – it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.
To be sure, nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory – part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction... What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.
If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.
Regenerative experiences: Plunge into the sea. The sun. An old city. Silence.
I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them.
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.