“As Plato insisted two thousand years ago, it is not by means of the image that moral, ethical, or political knowledge is produced.”

Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode.

The thing itself is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer’s Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.

In the final analysis, photography… is ever a hireling, ever the hired gun.

While the aesthetics of consumption (photographic or otherwise) requires a heroicized myth of the artist, the exemplary practice of the player-off codes requires only an operator, a producer, a scriptor, or a pasticheur.

… photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated – as though it had created itself.

We can’t simply do our science and not worry about the ethical issues.

The State, in fact, as the universal ethical will, is the creator of right.

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

One of the most depressing features of the ethical side of the matter is that instead of such methods arousing contempt they are more or less openly admired. And this is logical.

The planets resources are rare; we must consume more ethically and equitably.

Just because something happens to be legal does not make it moral, ethical or right.

There is nothing wrong with being well off as long as money has a social and ethical value and is not the object of one’s own greed.