In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.
I believe in invisible; I do not believe in visible.
I am interested in the nature of things. The nature of something is quite different from the way it looks.
I often try to photograph things about a person that are not visible.
Most portraits are lies. People are rarely what they appear to be, especially in front of a camera. You might know me your entire lifetime and never reveal yourself to me. To interpret wrinkles as character is insult not insight.
One of the marvelous things about film is that if you expose it long enough you’re going to get a picture.
I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I’m not interested in what things look like.
I already know what things look like – I don’t want description. People believe in appearances, and I don’t believe in appearances at all.
All good work has magic in it, and addresses the mind in a subtle way.
I’m very hard on the art world just being a big business.
To fulfil a fantasy is the quickest way to destroy it.
I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it’s pretty much trivialized.
I’m a terrible punster. And I love to rhyme. I just can’t help myself.
Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.
My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.
The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.
The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.
Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.
You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.
Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?
Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building – and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.