Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

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

Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

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

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