Writings/Sayings:

It has become important to see what is in front of me, literally: a face, a necklace of words, a darkness, a regret, a petal, an event...each and all at once, but also to see through these things.

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The trauma of war, its wound, is a violence against the integrity and relational wholeness of the human, and as such, fragments memory and consciousness, along with the possibility of any cohesive articulation of its experience.
I have never photographed war. Rather, I have brought back evidentiary images of isolated moments in its conduct: the murder of American nuns near San Salvador, the massacre of a village in Mozote, soldiers displaying their dismembered victims on a road. These moments are artifacts of my own relationship to war's violence and brutality. As such, they mark the impress of war's extremity upon my consciousness, and this mark is readable in the images, not as representation, but as indexical sign.
While working in South Africa under apartheid and state of emergency laws, I learned by telephone that I was to become a father. My wife later joined me, and we found ourselves, together with our unborn child, learning by immersion the horrors of state violence, legalized racism, and mass destitution. A month after our abrupt departure from South Africa, our son was born in Paris, and I confronted my own mortality for the first time. Out of a decade of warfare and brutality, a child emerged to carry his father into the first peace I had known in those years. His soul called to mine, and interrogated mine, offering against death the possibility of life. My memories refuse partition. Beneath my son's face are the faces of those who can no longer speak for themselves, and because of him I am able to reach backward to retrieve myself from the wreckage.

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The photograph is an artifact of a relationship. not ineffable but rather not yet transmutable. The peaceful image requires neither a reaction nor a response. All things are contiguous and contemporaneous-through this window, through this door, through this imagination.

The practice of non-violence, whether within oneself or in relation to others, is really only the experience of well-being.

This is what captivates from without as well as from within, the matrix and ground of trauma. Isolation. This is the voice itself devoured, a perishing wail over water, the drowned in the depths of the middle passage. This is about the doneness of things and the amendment to the doneness of things.

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Some years ago when I was in Japan a friend told me to look up a man who had been in Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb was dropped. He survived and made his way to safety with relatives in Nagasaki. Then the second bomb was dropped. When he grew up he became a kite maker. When I came to the city where he lived his son was dying of cancer and we did not meet. What he had done had already told me what I needed to know. Some of my pictures look into the violence of war, some into poverty. I see little difference. Both are places or states where people can have nothing more taken from them. Love flourishes. I have been taught this way to be present. A peasant woman in El Salvador who lived without the benefit of shoes or television or toothpaste said it best. "We? We measure our wealth in the quality of our relationships."

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The event no longer exists in the world. How it is present
in the mind is of interest-its configuration, its explanation of itself.

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That luminous vacuum that surrounds disaster will fade. Water and words will be wasted anew. The regular petty intrigues will resurface, mingling with the hoarding and greed. Selfishness and mistrust will regain their dominion. In time, memory will cover over, like the pain of an old love, what has happened here. The dead will be more names than faces to those who were not kin. Fewer and fewer will call out to God in the light of day. But there are some who have learned, who will look at you and go down into where you are who you are. They are like a fine watch in which some small part no longer functions with exact precision-a slight loss of time each hour, not enough to discard the watch, but enough to be irksome. Some piece of them does not move in harmony with the rest of the world, there is something inert. For those who were not there or who were too young will say "Oh, ever since the war..." or "He's not really all there..." Until they too are witness.