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The world is more than your thoughtless commute. We, the collateral, are your wealth, your teachers, your security, your family. Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of Creation.

It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness"—estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night.

Naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.'''

Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist upon their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up — a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing — that "it seemed like a movie." This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was. While many people in non-industrialized countries still feel apprehensive when being photographed, divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a sublimated looting of the personality or the culture, people in industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken — feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

The gifts of the earth are to be shared, but gifts are not limitless. The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all.