Don’t try to be an artist. Find the thing within you that needs to be expressed. You might find it is art.
I am an expressionist and by that I mean that I’m not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs.
In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.
A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.
Art is really whispering, not shouting.
Photography does deal with ‘truth’ or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality – it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?
I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.
I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.
Even in the deepest love relationship – when lovers say ‘I love you’ to each other – we don’t really know what we’re saying, because language isn’t equal to the complexity of human emotions.
Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people’s lives – something they know nothing about – and drawing great inferences into it.
I write in order to express what the photo itself cannot say. A photograph of my father doesn’t tell me what I thought of him, which for me is much more important than what the man looked like.
Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
We live in a culture where the one who shouts the loudest gets the most attention. It’s not in the vulgar, it’s not in the shock that one finds art. And it’s not the excessively beautiful. It’s in between; it’s in nuance.
Art is not fashionable. That’s why fashion and art are two different things. Fashion can never be art because fashion deals with whim, what is temporary, what changes, what is transient, what is now and not now. Art has to deal with issues that are timeless, that never change.
Art has to address eternal issues.
To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
Flowers construct the most charming geometries: circles like the sun, ovals, cones, curlicues and a variety of triangular eccentricities, which when viewed with the eye of a magnifying glass seem a Lilliputian frieze of psychedelic silhouettes.
Taking photographs and writing is my way of saying I was here, I saw this, I felt this, I heard this.
Taking the photograph is the easiest part for me.
I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.