"The ethical contend of photographs is fragile. With the possible exception of photographs of those horrors, like the Nazi camps, that have gained the status of ethical reference points, most photographs do not keep their emotional charge. A photograph of 1900 that was affecting then because of its subject would, today, be more likely to move us because it is a photograph taken in 1900. The particular qualities and intensions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. Aesthetic distance seems built into  the very experience of looking at photographs, it not rigth away, then certainly with the passsage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art."

Susan Sontag in On Photography