Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work.
I came from the outside, the rules of photography didn't interest me.
What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life.
Sometimes, I'd take shots without aiming, just to see what happened. I'd rush into crowds - bang! bang! ... It must be close to what a fighter feels after jabbing and circling and getting hit, when suddenly there's an opening, and bang! Right on the button. It's a fantastic feeling.
Anybody who pretends to be objective isn't realistic.
I have always loved the amateur side of photography, automatic photographs, accidental photographs with uncentered compositions, heads cut off, whatever. I incite people to make their self-portraits. I see myself as their walking photo booth.
I have always done the opposite of what I was trained to do... Having little technical background, I became a photographer. Adopting a machine, I do my utmost to make it malfunction. For me, to make a photograph is to make an anti-photograph.
I feel like I'm doing something that's worthwhile. I feel like I'm showing something other people haven't shown. I don't get to talk to the people who I photograph, I just go, along, banging away. So I don't really have a relationship with them. A lot of people think it's very important. I don't. It's like love at first sight. I have an impression when I see somebody, and I have an idea of who they are, or what they are.
I have a special relationship with God. And when I take the right photograph, God gives me a little bing! in the camera. And then I know I'm on the right track.
I thought New York had it coming, that it needed a kick in the balls. When I returned to New York, I wanted to get even. Now I had a weapon, photography.
The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn’t relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdotal for me… the kinetic quality of new york, the kids, dirt, madness—I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. Id crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn’t see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News.
I don't roam around with a camera and never did. I took pictures in spurts, for my books, for some assignments or on special occasions. Like people who take out their cameras for Christmas and birthdays. Each time, like them, probably, I feel it’s the first time and as if I would have to relearn the moves. Luckily, it comes pretty fast, like riding a bike.
I was a make believe ethnographer: treating New Yorkers like an explorer would treat Zulus - searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography.
