The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.