All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they’re about dead people. Paintings you don’t think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I’m looking at something dead.

Bailey contrasts photography with painting to stress photography’s tight bond to time and mortality. A photograph, even when it depicts living subjects, is an index of a vanished moment: the scene has already passed, and the people in it are already older—or gone—by the time we view it. That temporal “afterwardness” can make photos feel like elegies, while paintings (in his view) are less tethered to a specific instant and therefore less haunted by the sense of a moment being irretrievably over. The quote echoes a long tradition of thinking about photography as a medium of loss and remembrance, where the image’s realism intensifies its melancholy.