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.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).