Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.