The pictures are everywhere. If you're open, they will find you.
When I started using the extreme short depth of field and single point of focus, I was trying to replicate my changing eyesight. We have binocular vision; one eye perceives space from the other. I don't experience a scene visually at F32. It's more like F1. 4.
Had I not been told to look, I would have quite, ignorant of what was really there, because I had 'made plans' and was wearing visual and emotional blinders that limited my perceptions and my vision.
It's important to understand it's OK to control the subject. If most editorial stories were photographed just as they are, editors would end up throwing most in the waste basket. You have to work hard at making an editorial picture. You need to re-stage things, rearrange things so that they work for the story, with truth and without lying.
My taking pictures means I'm taking a series of pictures which become an essay and then get extended into a book. That's what's exciting, to take an idea and work it through to completion.
If acting doesn't work out, I plan to do food photography and just eat my way through the entire world. I'm a big foodie, and if I could make some career out of it, that would be fantastic.
Photography is a language more universal than words.
Photography is a craft. Anyone can learn a craft with normal intelligence and application. To take it beyond the craft is something else. That's when magic comes in. And I don't know that there's any explanation for that.
Getting anywhere you want is hard work. In this photography culture, everything looks so amazing. But it's actually very hard to get to where anybody gets.
Sven Schumann did an interview with photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in Berlin addressing the question: What is photography today when everyone is a photographer? These kinds of questions and answers you find in a magazine, on paper and not on Instagram. For me this is the essence of a magazine - it's questioning what's going on today and celebrating true creativity without compromise.
The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.
A photograph is just a little, teeny-weeny, small piece of life. I feel like I see so much more than what I can actually get.
I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner.
Nature photography. . . that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves.
I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence. " I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".
Now people ask whether photography is art, but I think the question is of absolutely no interest.
Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can't see watches you.
Every picture should have a place you can go, a home, a climax.
If you are bored with your own photography you are really bored with what you are photographing, so pick a new subject about which you are knowledgeable and enthusiastic.
Know - how is worthless unless guided by know - why and know - when.
