...there are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never “plain,” nor appearances ever “sincere.” To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dancehall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful. 

 One thing that struck me very early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in. 

 In some way [my photographs] claim to be a plausible account of, or a report on, what the events depicted are like, or were like, when they passed without being photographed. (On his “near documentary” images.)