Cameras always were seductive. And then a darkroom became available, and that's when I stopped doing anything else.
I look at a photograph. What's going on? What's happening, photographically? If it's interesting, I try to understand why.
Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it.
I don't know if I'm really the fastest. It doesn't matter.
There was a camera club at Columbia, where I was taking a painting course. And when I went down, somebody showed me how to use the stuff. That's all. I haven't done anything else since then, It was as simple as that. I fell into the business.
A photograph can look anyway. It just depends basically on what you photograph.
I don't know how to say easily what I learned. One thing I can say I learned is how amazing photography could be.
I generally deal with something happening.
I said the photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. And that's what it is.
Teaching doesn't relate to photographing, at least not for me.
It's got to do with the contention between content and form. Invariably that's what's responsible for its energies, its tensions, its being interesting or not.
I don't think time is involved in how the thing is made.
I never saw a pyramid, but I've seen photographs; I know what a pyramid or a sphinx looks like. There are pictures that do that, but they satisfy a different kind of interest.
I've goofed, and there's been something interesting, but I haven't made use of it. It just doesn't interest me.
I was a hired gun, more or less.
I don't go around looking at my pictures.
I'm surviving. I'm a survivor.
Nobody exists in a vacuum.
Tod or Hank Wessel, Bill Dane, Paul McConough, Steve Shore. Robert Adams, for sure. I'm ready to see what they do.There's a lot of people working reasonably intelligently.
I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it.
As far as my end of it, photographing, goes, all I'm interested in is pictures, frankly. I went to events, and it would have been very easy to just illustrate that idea about the relationships between the press and the event, you know.
I pretty much know what I'm doing.
I don't have anything to say in any picture. But you do, from your experience, surmise something. You do give a photograph symbolic content, narrative content... But it's nothing to worry about!
I had an agent. When [Edward] Steichen was doing "The Family of Man", I went up to the office one day. I think Wayne Miller, who assisted Steichen with "The Family of Man," was up there and pulled out a bunch of pictures. So I got a message: "Take these pictures, call Steichen, make an appointment and take these pictures up there." And that's how I met him.
I certainly never wanted to be a photographer to bore myself. It's no fun - life is too short.
