Less and less do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly’ - Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller’, p. 83.

‘The objective dimension possessed by an image imprinted in a photograph by virtue of its being, always, of necessity, the product of an encounter – even if a violent one – between a pho- tographer, a photographed subject, and a camera, an encounter whose involuntary traces in the photograph transform the latter into a docu- ment that is not the creation of an individual and can never belong to any one person or narrative exclusively. The photograph is out there, an object in the world, and anyone, always (at least in principle), can pull at one of its threads and trace it in such a way as to reopen the image and renegotiate what it shows, possibly even completely over- turning what was seen in it before’ - Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 13

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 202

Adam Zagajewski

Reflecting on his inspiring series of photographs of his mentally ill brother, Louis Quail writes: `I’m more inclined to believe that being ignored is worse than being intruded upon’ (Big Brother, p. 10).

`Before being artists, photographers or consumers, we are people’ - Luigi Ghirri, cited by Maria Antonella Pelizzari, ‘Luigi Ghirri’s Necessary Image’, in Luigi Ghirri: The Map and the Territory, p. 29

Ideally, one seeks an ​erotic as well as cerebral engagement with art.

`Although photography may appear to be a distinctive object of the contemplative life (vita contemplativa), a moment in which all movements have been eliminated, it is actually deeply embedded in the active life (vita activa); it attests to action and continues to take part in it, always engaged in an ongoing present that challenges the very distinction between contemplation and action. The photograph always includes a supplement that makes it possible to show that what “was there” wasn’t there necessarily in that way.’ - Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 90)

'Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them' - Elie Wiesel, Paris Review, Spring 1984.

Luigi Ghirri writing from Milan in 1979: `Reality is being transformed into a colossal photograph, and the photomontage already exists: it’s called the real world’.