You know, I really don't think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be- you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work.
Most photographs are of life, what goes on in the world. And that's boring, generally. Life is banal, you know. Let's say that an artist deals with banality. I don't care what the discipline is.
Frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about making a nice picture, that anybody can do.
Surviving, that's all. That's all I have in mind .
I think that there isn't a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability... They do not tell stories - they show you what something looks like. To a camera.
What if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can't prove otherwise. You don't know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really.
I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.
In the end, maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it's something else.
I have a burning desire to see what things look like photographed by me.
You've got to deal with how photographs look, what's there, not how they're made.
If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.
I have a good friend who's a very good printer. And he does a certain amount of printing for me. I do all the developing. If somebody's going to goof my film, I'd better do it. I don't want to get that mad at anybody else.
Let's put it this way - I photograph what interests me all the time. I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed. I'm saying the same thing; I'm not changing it.
What I know bores me.
I'm trying to learn more and more about what's possible.
I get totally out of myself. It's the closest I come to not existing, I think, which is the best - which is to me attractive.
I have no expectations. None at all.
You see something happening and you bang away at it. Either you get what you saw or you get something else--and whichever is better you print.
It's very easy to make successful photographs - it's very easy.
If you ever watch children play - what do you observe when you watch children play? You know, they're dead serious. They're not on vacation.
People are just dumb. They misunderstand.
All I'm doing is photographing. When I was working on The Animals, I was working on a lot of other things too. I kept going to the zoo because things were going on in certain pictures. It wasn't a project.
The camera's dumb, it don't [sic] care who's pushing the button. It doesn't know.
I'm still compulsively interested in women. It's funny, I've always compulsively photographed women. I still do.
When I look at photographs, I couldn't care less "how."
