Even though the last vestiges of materiality are attached to photographs, their value does not lie in the thing but in the information on their surface. 

 The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon [the] possibility of freedom—and thus its significance—in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us. 

 ...there is no everyday activity which does not aspire to be photographed, filmed or videotaped. For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable. 

 To be in the photographic universe means to experience, to know and to evaluate the world as a function of photographs. Every single experience, every single bit of knowledge, every single value can be reduced to individually known and evaluated photographs. 

 There can be no such thing as a naive, unconceived act of photographing. A photograph is an image of concepts. 

 [Photography] is an image created and distributed automatically by programmed apparatuses in the course of a game necessarily based on chance, an image of a magic state of things whose symbols inform its receivers how to act in improbable fashion. 

 Photographs permanently displacing one another according to a program are redundant precisely because they automatically exhaust the possibilities of the photographic program. This is therefore also the challenge for the photographer: to oppose the flood of redundancy with informative images.