On Photography

Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention.

Photography is the inventory of mortality.

Photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends, neighbors.

Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past but the one who invents it.

Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

Even if incompatible with intervention in a physical sense, using a camera is still a form of participation.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.