The really important thing is not to reject anything.

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.