“For it is in the nature of a photograph that it can never entirely transcend its subject, as a painting can. Nor can a photograph ever transcend the visual itself...”
"One of the perennial successes of photography has been its strategy of turning living beings into things, things into living beings."
"But the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it. Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle."
".... the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying truth."