Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.

How boring just to be a body.

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.