“The postmoderns and poststructuralists saw themselves as the heirs of Walter Benjamin, but his dialectical imagination eluded them: they never grasped his way of seeing. They could not understand that a photograph is objective and subjective, found and made, dead and alive, withholding and revealing. They could not see that although a photograph—like a novel, a poem, a work of journalism, or a painting—is often created by a person of relative privilege, it might nevertheless foster ideas of human connection and a vision of a less unjust world.”
— Susie Linfield, from The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence
