“… the battle for the acceptance of photography as Art was not only counter-productive but counter-revolutionary. The most important photography is most emphatically not Art.”

The simple fact is this: There are no neutral photographs.

Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.

It is no coincidence that one cardinal rule in brainwashing is to remove from the victim all photographs of himself and people he has known.

What a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look – at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools.

The past is always with us, in the form of our photographs, which we feel as we might a rosary, wearing them smooth with the fingering of our eyes.

We’ve spent now about 150 years trying to convince ourselves that photographs are reliable evidence, some unimpeachable slice of the real world. That was a myth from the very beginning.