To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged...to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing - including...another person's pain or misfortune.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography

~ Photo of genocide of Serbians during the Kosovo War; interestingly, this also brings up another phenomenon from this period (not over, is it? couldn't tell, could you?), what they are calling 'gendercide', that is the targeting of healthy males (reasonable tactic, I suppose, if you want to win, and are brutal enough to carry it out), and all of the resulting psychological and sociological damage that results, not to mention the desired effect of depleting the targeted population, now and for the future.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers...Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged to gradually give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something.

Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Me, Dried Mud in Corrales, New Mexico