I've been fortunate that I've been able to consistently explore the things that are most
interesting to me about my life and life in general, and that's what I photograph.
That's what I look at in my study and I attempt to understand through my photographs and my
books.
I usually, when I'm making the image, I'm usually looking at something that corresponds
with an emotional suspicion I might have had, or a whiff of some kind of intuition or something.
Or sometimes it might be in ice cold correspondence to a specific thought.
I take pictures for a lot of different reasons, and I feel a lot of different things when
I'm taking them.
I'm working in Berlin by night, and so I'm thinking about Berlin at night.
That's one set of feelings.
I'm working on a book on the Gibson guitar with Dandy Summers, and I'm a guitar player,
and so I'm thinking about my relationship to the instrument ever since I was a boy.
So you can't really answer that question with one specific answer, it varies with each
experience.
I am influenced by culture in general.
I think if you want to be a photographer you study architecture and literature and music
and languages and things like that.
It's for that reason.
I love photographing in the older cultures in Europe and things like that.
So I am totally influenced.
I mean I can study the subjunctive in French and find that it influences the way I see
something.
I want all my activities to integrate into one totality in that sense.
That's why the guitars are never off.
I'm always advancing that while I'm advancing a book idea, while I'm advancing my understanding
of something else.
It's the highest form of satisfaction that I've ever experienced.
Let's take a picture loading that camera.
This is sort of a man bites dog.
It's easier, my system goes faster.
When I'm in the dark room making a print, looking at the first print of a strong image,
and knowing that I participated, I don't really feel that I'm the music.
I'm just sort of like the radio through which the music plays.
That's how I feel as a photographer.
I'm something through which photography speaks.
At such moments when I'm participating in the making of a strong image, it has a powerful
spiritual tranquility attached to it and a sense of self-reflection and a kind of introspection
that can be trusted that is unattainable otherwise.
I like to consider that my personal perceptive act, no matter what I'm looking at, is the
subject of the photograph.
For that reason, I only photograph things I'm interested in and want to photograph.
When you have that point of view, when you feel that way about your work, you can't really
be available for commercial assignments.
Now could we?
I use the finest equipment that you can buy and I don't use a lot of it.
I'm not technically dependent on a lot of effect in that regard.
I want it just to be point blank naked vision.
That's what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to refine that.
As part of my technique, I continue to try and refine that.
As a young photographer, I would emphatically suggest that at no point do you ever imitate,
emulate, copy the photographers that you admire.
Nothing to be learned.
Nothing to be learned from that.
Successful photographs are easy to copy.
You just analyze it.
Photography is deceptively simple in that regard.
Joseph Albers said photography is physical fact slash psychic effect.
How can mere physical fact have such powerful psychic effect?
Well, the mission quotient is the vision of the practitioner, of the photographer.
He or she was what brought that phenomenon to light.
You can't really get anywhere imitating somebody else's work.
Now, if you want to be a commercial photographer, you can.
Commercial photographers do do photographs to make money.
Art photographers need money to make photographs.
It's an entirely different approach to the media.
If you're working professionally and a certain photographer's look is hot at the time, well
then you just knock off that look and that's what they do anyway.
But if you're serious about the medium, I think that all you can try and do is your
own thing.
At best, you'll be lucky if you even get to do that.
You have your best chance knocking off yourself better than anybody else.
What would that look like?
You have to learn from failure.
I learned more from my failures and from my successes.
And prior to realizing that, I might have misinterpreted that phenomenon as frustration.
But the truth is that the pictures that I make that are successful don't really teach
me anything.
They satisfy and please.
But the ones that are not successful are the ones that inform my subsequent efforts.
I've always wanted to be a photographer, still want to be one.
If I'm alive 20 years from now, I can tell you I'll still be one.
My entires are raised on debts, but I don't know what I would do if it weren't for photography.
I might be a musician.
It's meant so many things in the course of my life, but I know that as long as my work
is going well, everything else falls into place, everything.
Now tell me, is there a God?
