To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting
oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and,
therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating
people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have
engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to
build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of
leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic
images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look
of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an
event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like
paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements
about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can
make or acquire.