All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.
The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.
Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death.
The camera is a killing chamber, which speeds up the time it claims to be conserving. Like coffins exhumed and priced open, the photographs put on show what we were and what we will be again.