The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.

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

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. 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.