If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English: A Novel

One is cautioned by the better critics never to write about photographs. They are an easy substitute for prose, a hackneyed shortcut, and, besides, they lie like all images do.

Virginia Heffernan puts forward in her book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. “Instagram images have become units of speech, building blocks in a visual vocabulary that functions like a colonial patois, where old-school darkroom photography is the native tongue and digitalization is the imperial language.”