“There’s this Robert Capa quote—‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,’” [Paolo Pellegrin] told me. “Very true! It always comes back to reducing or annulling distance. But that is only part of the equation. The other part is that if you’re not good enough, then you’re not reading enough. And the idea there is that photography is not actually about taking pictures—taking pictures is incidental. It’s a by-product, in a sense, of everything else. What you’re really doing is giving form—photographic form—to a thought, to an opinion, to an understanding of the world, of what is in front of you. And so if we think in these terms, then you have to improve the quality of your thoughts.”

Ben Taub, “Paolo Pellegrin’s Photographic Quest for the Sublime”