Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.

What we need is to use what we have.

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

Communism is fascism with a human face.