Photography is a gorgeous corpse turning on the first night in its bed of soil. Photography is a shawl caught on the finger of a gnarled, eternal olive tree. Photography is not about victory; victory is viler, baser than the loll of a child’s head on that child’s own chest.

When he talks about the dead he means the dead. And they’re present in images. They still live on.

Together, they are the backdrop to a vanishing way of life.

Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked – and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was