One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.