Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

I'm more cautious about what I write.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.

You can always be quoted.

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

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.