Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

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.

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.

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 problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.