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The artist is trying to bring into existence something (even if only a concept) that never existed before. The photographer is trying to preserve, with the lens and especially the shutter, something in reality that will cease to exist in just that way in the very next moment, or hour or day.

One curious thing is that you can't take two pictures of a human being and have them be line for line the same, unless the person is dead. And then you can only do it for a while. Change. Photography is deeply related to change, but in a conservative way. It wants to stop change. It also wants to lay claim to immortality. We can see pictures of Abraham Lincoln. In a way, because the photograph exists, not all of him died. We can still reclaim a particular visual moment of his life that occurred over a century ago. You can't do that with any paintings of him. All you can reclaim is the

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artist, not really, really Lincoln. Not for sure. Not as inherent in the medium of painting itself.

The product of the photographic medium it itself a medium.... In a photograph one goes beyond the photograph to what was photographed as well as how or who was photographed.

If we now had a photograph of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed or Caesar, we would first of all want it to be very good technically. If it were nicely composed at a decisive moment, all of that would be a bonus, but not essential. Because what we're seeking is the surface visual reality first; the niceties second if at all. All that painting has as inherent in the medium is the niceties. That is why there's so much stress on style and why the fashions change so.

... I think that this sense of life, of immediacy, of quickness, of simple visual sense perception is