" The only genuinely photographic subjects are those which are violated, taken by surprise, discovered or exposed despite themselves, those which should never have been represented because they have neither self-image nor selfconsciousness. The savage - like the savage part of us - has no reflection. He is savagely foreign to himself. The most seductive women are the most selfestranged (Marilyn). Good photography does not represent anything: rather, it captures this non-representability, the otherness of that which is foreign to itself (to desire, to self-consciousness), the radical exoticism of the object.
Objects, like primitives, are way ahead of us in the photogenic stakes: they are free a priori of psychology and introspection, and hence retain all their seductive power before the camera.
Photography records the state of the world in our absence. The lens explores this absence; and it does so even in bodies and faces laden with emotion, with pathos. Consequently, the best photographs are photographs of beings for which the other does not exist, or no longer exists (primitives, the poor, objects). Only the non-human is photogenic. Only when this precondition is met does a kind of reciprocal wonder come into play - and hence a collusiveness on our part vis-a-vis the world, and a collusiveness on the part of the world with respect to us. "

― Jean Baudrillard , The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena