Photographs are never records of the way things are; they're records of the way things were.

To be sure, not all moments are equally fleeting. Some moments last longer than others. And certain events do reoccur more than once and even recur repeatedly. Sometimes you do get more than one chance. Sometimes you don't. It helps to know how long a window of opportunity you have and if you'll get another chance.

Many oriental cultures make a distinction between two ways of looking - 'hard eyes' and 'soft eyes'. When we look with hard eyes, we see specific details with sharp focus, but we don't see the relationships between different details as well. When we look with soft eyes we see the relationships between everything in our field of vision, but with this softer focus, we don't see all the details as clearly. It's possible to look in two ways at once.

It's one thing to make a beautiful thing; it's another thing to make a living thing.

How do we know what we know? Is seeing believing? Is believing seeing?

Very often there is too little information in photographs to deduce how they were made and even what they represent. We rely on context and supplemental information to confirm our observations, not simply the documents themselves.

It takes asking many questions from many perspectives to truly understand something.