Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each o these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.