“With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“I loved your breaking down that door, repeated Djuna. Through Rango she had breathed some other realm she had never attained before. She had touched through his act some climate of violence she had never known before.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting, horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else...The mountain man's obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others