In the instant she depresses the shutter everything is changed. This sudden opening of the gate in the mechanism allows the photographer to slip through the gap to the space in front of the lens, the space that is seen. In doing so she impresses her governing role onto the scene, coating the subjects with something indefinable form her own presence. Her presence is, after all, hidden in the photograph but dominant in the moment of photographing. The act of photography is a metaphysical relation that differs entirely from the resultant photograph in that the photograph obscures the nature of the actual event.
The man puts the child down and the other runs off. The leaves of the potted plant sway up and down on long, cantilevered stems. They all exit. This end is always about to happen; the illusion of suspended time is wholly misleading.

M. Anthony Penwill, It Has To Be This Way (Matt's Gallery: 2009) pp. 31-32

Instead of culminating in hoped-for emancipation, the advances of technology and "Reason" made it that much easier to exploit the South of planet earth, blindly replace human labour by machines, and set up more and more sophisticated subjugation techniques, all through a general rationalisation of the production process. So the modern emancipation plan has been substituted by countless forms of melancholy.

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Les presses du réel: 2002) p. 12

What does it mean to say that something is a drawing – as opposed to a fundamentally different form, such as a photograph? First of all, arriving at the image is a process, not a frozen instant. Drawing for me is about fluidity. There may be a vague sense of what you're going to draw, but things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate or shed doubts on what you know. So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion version of thought. It does not arrive instantly like a photograph. The uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning. What ends in clarity does not begin that way.

William Kentridge, William Kentridge (Phaidon: 1999) p. 8

De gamla som redan är döda skall man inte ta på allvar, då gör man dem orätt. Vi odödliga tycker inte om att bli tagna på allvar, vi älskar skämtet. Allvaret, min gosse, är en sak som hör hemma i tiden; det uppstår, så mycket vill jag tala om för dig, när man överskattar tiden. [...] Men i evigheten, ser du, finns ingen tid; evigheten är blott ett ögonblick och varar just lagom länge för ett skämt.

Herman Hesse, Stäppvargen (Albert Bonniers Förlag: 2003) p. 77
Originally published in 1955

There is always hope, but that must be combined with irony, and more important, skepticism. The context of knowledge is changing constantly.

Anselm Kiefer, "Heaven Is An Idea" in Anselm Kiefer, Heaven and Earth (Prestel: 2005) p. 166