Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.
I don't have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It's not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn't do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.
I am at war with the obvious.
I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.
A picture is what it is and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.
I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.
You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.
Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it's just about impossible to follow up with words. They don't have anything to do with each other.
There is no particular reason to search for meaning.
Photography just gets us out of the house.
I don't think about what camera I should use that much. I just pick up the one that looks nicest on the day.
It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.
I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.
Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.
I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify.
I’ve always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they’re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that’s not well organized upside down, it won’t work.
I like to photograph democratically.
I don't look at other photographs much at all. I don't know why. I study my own a lot.
We have a few things in common - smoking, drinking, and women. Photography just gets us out of the house. (To photographer Juergen Teller)
Generally, that's what happens-a fundamental rotting of the idea. They woke up with the wrong idea. It's just like music: If you don't have an innate love or calling for it, then no matter how much you study or how well you can play by looking at the score, it doesn't mean that you're going to make really good music.
And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.
I think with being blind the one thing you would have going is that you could still feel things, see your way around so to speak. And if you had had the experience of seeing at one time in your life, then you would know what it was like and be able to function. I've said this before, I think I could really photograph blind if I had to.
Well, probably the best way to put it might be that at some time, not just in an instant, but over some period of time I became aware of the fact that I wanted to document examples like Kroger or Piggly Wiggly in the late '50s, early '60s.
Many people one meets in life somehow think they know you simply because they're hanging out at the same counter-but they really don't know a thing about you.
I quite frequently don't look through the camera, which is very close to being blind.
