I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
It’s not hard being great occasionally. It’s difficult to be good consistently.
Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.
I believe that you’ve got to love your work so much that it is all you want to do.
The way someone who’s being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer’s response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.
My photographs don’t go below the surface. They don’t go below anything. They’re readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.
One man’s fantasy is another man’s job.
I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won’t be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I’ll be photographing other old people.
How many pictures have you torn up because you hate them? What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable – and they’re screaming the next minute. I’ve never seen a family album of screaming people.
We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be. – PERFORMANCE.
I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment.
If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.
When you pose for a photograph, it’s behind a smile that isn’t yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.
Faces are the ledgers of our experience.
When I was a boy, my family took great care with our snapshots. We really planned them. We made compositions. We posed in front of expensive cars, homes, that werent ours. We borrowed dogs. Almost every family picture taken of us when I was young had a different borrowed dog in it.
People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion.
I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.
I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn’t look like that guy in the pictures.
He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.
There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone’s person.