What if, instead, we were to start with an ontology in which fluidity and solidity are not mutually incompatible properties? […] Continuous variation is more comparable to rhythm. Following Lefebvre (2004), rhythms result from the concurrence of difference and repetition, in which time and space are mutually implicated. In a world marked by rhythm there would be neither pure solidity nor pure fluidity. Conversely, a world that was purely solid or purely fluid would be without rhythm. This is consistent with the ways indigenous communities around the circumpolar north have been reporting their experience of climate change as things going out of phase. They may report, for example, that sea-ice recedes or that migratory species arrive earlier than expected, judged in relation to other environmental comings and goings with which they usually coincide. These are not punctuated contrasts but disturbances in the rhythmic fluctuations of a solid-fluid world in perpetual becoming: where nothing is solid or fluid but everything solid-becoming-fluid or fluid-becoming-solid (Serres 2000). […] The Inuit notion of sila perfectly reflects this ontology. Referring interchangeably to both weather and climate, sila is translated as the breath of life and the reason things move and change. It also means intelligence, consciousness or mind, and is understood to be a fundamental principle underlying the integrity of the cosmos. In the words of Nuttall, “it is an all-pervading life-giving force connecting a person with the rhythms of the universe, integrating the self with the natural world”. Conversely, lack of sila can mean that either people or the environment are going crazy. The emphasis on breath here is critical. In breathing we both surrender ourselves to the environment and launch ourselves into it. With every inhalation, the atmosphere enters into and becomes part of us; every exhalation in turn releases part of us into the atmosphere (Ingold 2015, 84–88). No other process matches this continual rhythmic exchange with the environment – one that continues throughout life. Through breathing we are immersed in our surroundings, and our surroundings in us. In a living world of solid-fluids, marked by constant rhythmic transformation, no organism could endure that was not open, through respiration, to its surroundings.

— Cristián Simonetti & Tim Ingold, Ice and Concrete

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?
— Ernst Haas

An artist can have an intention, but the viewer has their own subjective experience.
– Robert Longo

Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.
— Peter Adam

The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality.

— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

As part of the business of everything being made a commodity, the shop window has taken the place of the altar-piece and the painting. Tens of thousands look into these windows and wonder. Here are the modern still-lives and the modern heroes and heroines. The function of the shop-window tableau is really the same as that of sculpture for the Greeks, or frescoes for the Italians of the Renaissance. These works appealed because they embodied the hopes, the ideals, the potentiality of most of the people who looked at them. Today there is only one common ideal, created and fostered by commerce: it is the principle that Only what you haven’t yet got is worth having.

— John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel

(the book was published in 1956. Right before Andy Warhol began experimenting with putting paintings he made for shop windows into galleries.)

Not all cultures in the world share the dominant Western view of a secularized, utilitarian, depersonalized nature. The existence of alternative views of the natural environment is important as part of the cultural heritage of humankind. This cultural diversity is akin to biodiversity as the raw material for evolutionarily adaptive responses

— Fikret Berkes (Sacred Ecology)