“We are all so overwhelmed by culture that it is a relief to see something which is done directly, without any intention of being good or bad, done only because one wants to do it.”

Now that photo is all over the internet, completely out of my control.

“I take H [hashish] in order to be free. But in order to take H I must already be free.”

utterly sanguine

Here Malcolm puts her own artful spin on Benjamin’s famous allusion to the camera’s ability “with its devices of slow motion and enlargement” to reveal hidden and unseen truths: “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of [the] optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

“By transferring a fact into words and characters you create other facts that can never recreate the original one.”

“The more honestly you put yourself into the story, the more that story will concern others as well.”

the photograph as “memento mori” and “inventory of mortality”

“The dullest, most inept and inconsequential snapshot, when isolated, framed (on a wall or by the margins of a book), and paid attention to, takes on all the uncanny significance, fascination, and beauty of R. Mutt’s fountain