Artistic talent is far more common than the talent to nurture artistic talent.
I think most serious photographers understand that there's this large gap between the world and how the world looks through a photograph.
I realize that as I get more experience as I get older, my perception changes and that feeds the photograph.
I meet young artists and it becomes clear that with some the main motivation is getting a show in Chelsea. It strikes me that this is very different to the way it was for me, which was that I wanted to understand photography and the world and myself.
I'm not interested in doing the same kind of picture over and over again. I pose problems for myself. Sometimes they are aesthetic problems and sometimes they are logistical problems.
I don't know how much a photograph can add to a biography, the way a film or writing or narrative medium could. Because it's a frozen image.
If I only try to solve the problems I set for myself, then I'm limited by what I can conceive of. I can't solve a problem I can't conceive. But if someone else gives me a visual problem, it can be out of the whole realm of my normal practice.
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.
The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one.
I'm actually very ordinary, except people get to pay their money to come watch me work. The same way that we go to McDonald's. . we don't care about the guy behind the counter, but if he was doing something special, we'd pay our money to go watch him cook that hamburger.
The tax that was supposed to soak the rich has instead soaked America. The beneficiary of the income tax has not been the poor, but big government. The income tax has given us a government bureaucracy that outnumbers the manufacturing work force. It has created welfare dependencies that have entrapped millions of Americans in an underclass that is forced to live a sordid existence of trading votes for government handouts.