On Photography

means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.

grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

ime eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

t is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia

Photographs furnish evidence.

Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966)

The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does.

What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings.