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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

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Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, th...more

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My library is an archive of longings.

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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 t...more

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What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appea...more

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With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.

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We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine...more

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It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a vie...more

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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

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To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mer...more

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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 sufferin...more

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Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, withou...more

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No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

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Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

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It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.