The Image-World

"Photography does not simply reproduce the real, it recycles it -  a key procedure of a modern society.  IN the form of photographic images, things and events are put to new uses, assigned new meanings, which go beyond the distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the useful and the useless, good taste and bad.  Photography is one of the chief means for producing that quality ascribed to things and situations which erases these distinctions: "the interesting."

-From The Image-World, by Susan Sontag