Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each o these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning.

I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.

There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.