Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

It is passivity that dulls feeling.

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.