“Go back to this mess of photographs that you’ve been shown. Why do I like doing this? I’m sure that we’ve all had the experience of you pick up a biography or you pick up a history, say a history of World War I, or the Civil War, whatever. I pick up a biography and I ask myself, ‘why am I reading about this person’s maternal grandparents? I don’t want to know anything about them, maybe I should skip to page 197.’

What a photograph does—same thing with a history of war, you’re reading about the antecedents of the conflict, this that, and the other thing. You’re being slowly marched progressively through a history of this war. What photographs do is they short-circuit all of that. It’s another interesting phenomenon. All of a sudden I look at that picture of the Valley of the Shadow of Death—I’m right in the middle of that war. I’m in the middle of that war in some God-forsaken place, a very specific place, a very specific time, and it allows me to write a story among other things about that conflict completely different from what I would have written if I were just looking at it from afar. You know, it allows us to enter history at the level of the particular rather than the general. That’s another amazing thing about them.”

—Errol Morris at LIVE on November 2, 2011. Watch/listen to the program here…