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What does it all matter, as long as the wounds fit the arrows - Franz Kafka

We are all children of photography as surely as we are living in the age of Freud, even if we have never picked up a camera or given a second's thought to the hidden places of the mind. Our eye is almost inseperable from the camera's eye. We find beautiful in person those men and women we know the camera will favor.

... The naked eye jumps so readily to the photograph that the act of shooting and printing becomes redundant. If this is true for people who are innocent of photographic technicalities, how much more of an influence must photographic values exert on the ever-growing number of citizens who are technically skilled and self-conscious - the generation's for whom family photographs are not snaps of incompetent human

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muddle (grandma's hand on the dog's tail in the foreground by mistake) but ambitiously composed, carefully spontaneous portraits mount on the wall in gallery frames.

p. 190-91

Perhaps it is true that the unyielding environment of Manhattan, which deprives inhabitants of the most banal human pleasures (breathing fresh air, for instance), compensates by developing the eye. If we have the skills of passing within a hairbreadth of our fellows without touching, there is no taboo against looking, even with our headphones on. New Yorkers exercise their eyes continually in dramatic ways: looking out and down from high up in huge office towers; looking into the highly charged light-into-dark of the subway entrance; looking through the