Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.

Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.