Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

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

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.

Art is a form of consciousness.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.