I don't know. I don't go around looking at my pictures. I sometimes think I'm a mechanic. I just take pictures. When the time comes, for whatever reason, I get involved in editing and getting some prints made and stuff. There are things that interest me. But I don't really mull over them a lot.
Let's say that what's out there is a narrative. Often enough, the picture plays with the question of what actually is happening. Almost the way puns function.
There've been times it's been just impossible to find a negative or whatever. But I'm basically just a one man operation, and so things get messed up. I don't have a filing system that's worth very much.
I still don't understand why when you put a piece of paper in a tray with solution in it, it comes up. It's still, in a sense, magic to me. It's a funny thing, you know. I've got two kids, and when they were very young, they used to come in the darkroom and I thought they'd be astounded by that. Nothing. When they got a little older, then they got astounded by it.
A photograph can look any way.
It's the easiest thing in the world to do that, to make successful photographs. It's a bore.
I have to photograph where I am.
Sometimes photographers mistake emotion for what makes a great street photograph.
I'm talking about technical goofs. I'm pretty much on top of it. The kind of picture you're referring to would have to be more about the effects of technical things, technical phenomena, and I'm just not interested in that kind of work at all.
I'm a good craftsman and I can have this particular intention: let's say, I want a photograph that's going to push a certain button in an audience, to make them laugh or love, feel warm or hate or what - I know how to do this.
There are no photographs while I'm reloading .
There's an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference.
I really try to divorce myself from any thought of possible use of this stuff. That's part of the discipline. My only purpose while I'm working is to try to make interesting photographs, and what to do with them is another act - an alter consideration. Certainly while I'm working, I want them to be as useless as possible.
There are things I photograph because I'm interested in those things.
There's no way a photograph has to look... in a sense. There are no formal rules of design that can apply.
You're talking about meaning. I want to talk about the picture.
When I was a kid in New York I used to go to the zoo. I always liked the zoo. I grew up within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo. And then when my first two children were young, I used to take them to the zoo. Zoos are always interesting. And I make pictures.
I sometimes think I'm a mechanic. I just take pictures.
The primary problem is to learn to be your own toughest critic. You have to pay attention to intelligent work, and to work at the same time. You see. I mean, you’ve got to bounce off better work. It’s matter of working.
The photo is a thing in itself. And that's what still photography is all about.
Nobody sold prints then and prices didn't mean anything. In terms of earning your living, it was a joke.
My intention is to make interesting photographs. That's it, in the end. I don't make it up. Let's say it's a world I never made. That's what was there to deal with.
Well, in terms of what a camera does. Again, you go back to that original idea that what you photograph is responsible for how it [the photograph] looks. And it's not plastic, in a way. The problem is unique in photographic terms.
I develop my own film. And I work in spurts. I pile it up.
The game, let's say, of trying to state photographic problems is, for me, absolutely fascinating.
