"Regarding the Pain of Others" Quotes

The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs.

To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

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.

Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

We are all in some measure estranged from the world we are born into.

No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

Only that which narrates can make us understand.

A photograph, while recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen.

The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images.