There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. - Susan Sontag

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature—the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society—it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one — or both. Usually both.