We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.

What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

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.