Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.