The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories.
For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.
We’ve all got an identity. You can’t avoid it. It’s what’s left when you take everything else away.
My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do – that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.
There’s a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean everyone knows you’ve got some edge. You’re carrying some magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way.
If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.
The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.
One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.
If I didn’t have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.
It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, “All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up.” And they did.
I mean, it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.
We stand on a precipice, then before a chasm, and as we wait it becomes higher, wider, deeper, but I am crazy enough to think it doesn’t matter which way we leap because when we leap we will have learned to fly. Is that blasphemy or faith?
It’s always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.
I mean, if you’ve ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don’t.
Lately I’ve been struck with how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it’s very thrilling for me to see darkness again.
I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.
I think all families are creepy in a way.
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.