“The very fact that [the photograph] emerges from a fleeting moment in time means that that time is irrevocably lost. Even to exchange the photographed rose with the real rose a few hours later is to expose the delicate ravage of time in a disposition of pollen or fallen petal or the transformation of light. Photographs are celebrations of the uniqueness of every moment of being, every configuration of shadow and substance, and an elegy upon them. The permanent structures guaranteed by the physics of light, and the impermanent moment when the light never again falls in exactly the same way, are its dialectic. Photographs are as heavily mediated as paintings, depending on light, camera angle, the grain of paper, the mood of the artist. Photographs of the same object by different people are always different, utterances about the play of light, universes exposed in a single lens, epiphanies of transcience.”

–Isobel Armstong’s The Radical Aesthetic, p. 8
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