A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world

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

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.