Michael Lesy
[Writer and artist, b. 1945, Shaker Heights, Ohio, lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.]

 My idea of a good job would be to be paid really well to sit on my ass all day to look at pictures. 
 Cameras don’t take pictures, people take pictures. 
 By itself, an ordinary snapshot is no less banal than the petite madeleine in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time… but as goad to memory, it is often the first integer in a sequence of recollections that has the power to deny time for the sake of love. 
 The pictures you’re about to see are of people who were actually once alive. 
 Look, I really do not care about you. What I care about is the worlds that you bear witness to. You are nothing more than a dog with a video camera strapped on its back. As you walk the streets looking for a place to mate or piss or eat, the camera is on and we will see the world because of you... You carry the camera and we enjoy the world. (On images as autobiography) 
 For years and years and years… people showed me pictures that had been left unclaimed at big photo-finishers. Sometimes I think it changed my personality, sometimes I wonder if it didn’t damage my brain.