To us, the difference between the #‎ photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #‎ photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.

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.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

To photograph is to confer importance.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.