What happens with experiences that really move us deeply, that really effect us? They make the world new again. What it does is it heightens our sense of mortality.

In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph.

As a boy I was obsessed with Egypt and Egyptology. I'm convinced it's not that uncommon. A lot of 10 or 12 year old boys become obsessed with Egypt. It's a bit like young girls and horses.

No medium is more limited than any other. It's what a person does with it. We could talk about the differences between music and literature and photography, sure, but it really comes down to what a person does.

There are no inherent limitations to the medium. There are just differences.

For all the textbook reasons - any individual's reading of a photograph is preceded by the evidential authority of the medium. You have the literalness of a glass on a table - and at the same time of that evidential authority that you can't get around, there is the possibility of universalizing the subject - of getting the whole world into the picture.

The world is a colony of the US. The twentieth century was the US's century.