Known and Strange Things

Authorship, after all, is not only what is created but also what is selected.

An image depends radically on context, on how it is placed but also on who is looking at it.

“The photograph isn’t what was photographed, it’s something else,” Garry Winogrand once said. “It’s about transformation.” The photographic image is a fiction created by a combination of lenses, cameras, film, pixels, color (or its absence), time of day, season.

The victim, by continuing to suffer, irritates the oppressor, who would rather be already past it.

When you do visit Zürich or Cape Town or Bangkok, they are very much alike: the amusement parks have striking similarities, the cafés all play the same Brazilian music, the malls are interchangeable, kids on the school buses resemble one another, and the interiors of middle-class homes conform to the same parameters. This doesn’t mean the world is

There is a photograph coming at you every few seconds, and hype is the lingua franca. It has become hard to stand still, wrapped in the glory of a single image, as the original viewers of old paintings used to do. The flood of images has increased our access to wonders and at the same time lessened our sense of wonder.

Things that would not have merited a second glance are now unquestioningly, almost automatically, recorded. The doors of our fridges, glimpses of cleavage, images of our birthday cakes, the setting sun: cheap photography makes visible the ways in which we are similar, and have for a long time been similar. Now we have proof, again, and again, and a

In photography, as in writing, there’s no shortcut to finding that voice.

Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs.