It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

Love dies because its birth was an error.

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.