Images are not only visual. They're also auditory, they involve sensuous impressions, bundles of information that come to us through our senses, and mainly through seeing and hearing: the audio-visual field.

I see stereotypes as fundamental and inescapable and not as something that is... The kind of common view is "Oh, we shouldn't think in stereotypes," and I think the reality is we can't help but think in stereotypes.

Imperialism, or the conquest and colonization of other populations, other peoples, has had as one of its side effects the growth of a discourse of objectivity. That is, when you encounter something new, something strange, something different, you have to find categories for it, you have to come to terms with new objects.

Obviously invidious and prejudicial stereotypes need to be deconstructed and overcome, but it's not that they can be destroyed. I think that would be an illusion to think that we can somehow get rid of these basic search templates that allow us to sort out our social lives and to sort out the material world as well.

When students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut out the eyes.

I think its a fundamental feature of images that they move from one medium to another. And this has become hyper-evident in our time with the computer, which is a kind of master-medium also and allows us to transfer data of all kinds from one platform to another, turning sounds into sights or language into image. The computer has made something that is very old evident in a new way.

I know stereotypes have a bad reputation, people say, "Oh, you shouldn't stereotype people," but I think it's important to recognize that we couldn't function in the world without stereotypes.