The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent – war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

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.

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.