There is a great quote from a female writer. She said, 'If you don't break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you are not writing well enough. I tend to agree. I think my best pictures come when I push myself.
Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs.
You can tell a good ruined lens, right from the get-go.... That’s the kind of lens I'm looking for.
I don't see many artists who are not trying to bring their work to the public - -to the contrary I see artists nearly desperate to get attention for their art and, failing that, often for themselves.
There are a number of things that set Southern artists apart from anyone else. Their obsession with place and their obsession with family.
As an artist your trajectory just has to keep going up. the thing that subverts your next body of work is the work you've taken before.
When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths 'told slant,' just as Emily Dickinson commanded.
I’m past photographing to see what things look like photographed.
Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity, and when you're photographing children there's often an abundance of it. I would have an idea of what a photograph would look like and then something would happen - a dog might lumber in and become a critical element. I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.
These dog bones are just making art the way art should be made, without any overarching reference. Just for fun, if you can imagine that-art for fun.
There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 x 10 [camera] business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I'm always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. And some of them did.
I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.
My main interest was finding boyfriends. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in.
Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb—an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt.
