Time past cannot be stopped, saved, or regained. But a photograph allows you to borrow it.
A meaningful conceptual basis is always more important than vivid photographs, and vice versa.
Photography seems to fix, but this is an illusion created by our short lives. A photograph is merely a note held for 200 years.
Photography has a natural affinity for the strategies of surrealism - the exaltation of chance and eros, the exploration of obsession and the release of the unconscious.
Images are the currency of our age, but it's a toss-up whether live in a time of abundance or debasement.
Photographs should celebrate the contingent, the spontaneous, the incomplete, the fortuitous. Direct, unblinking vision should be coupled with deliberate indifference as to subject. The ironic goal is a scrupulous recording of whatever chance brings to hand.
To teach consequential photography, don't bother with Photoshop or f-stops. Create a craving for images.
If you scratch through the deceitful artifice of contemporary photography, you'll find the real artifice underneath.