Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people.

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

My library is an archive of longings.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each o these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning.