The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.

[The photograph] is the object itself... [It] shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast... [But] the cinema realizes the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well.

The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it.

The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.