“In any art, you don’t know in advance what you want to say – it’s revealed to you as you say it. That’s the difference between art and illustration.”

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assert themselves with finality. And that’s your picture.

The only nature I’m interested in is my own nature.

To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism.

For some reason or other there was in me the desire to see the world clean and fresh and alive, as primitive things are clean and fresh and alive. The so-called documentary picture left me wanting something.

Purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.

The only other things I got from the abstract expressionists is the absolute belief that this canvas is the complete total area of struggle, this is the arena, this is where the fight is taking place, the battle.

As photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as they approach, group and regroup as you shift your position.

If you look very intensely and slowly things will happen that you never dreamed of before.

When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).

However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.

It is no longer a matter of expressing reality, but of expressing what one feels about reality.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.

As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.

The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.

I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.

If you deeply appreciate and love what creative people do and how they think, which is usually in unpredictable and irrational ways, then you can start to understand them. And finally, you can see inside their minds and DNA.

When I was working in my first job engineering construction, what I liked the most was working with architects and making buildings that had this creative side coming from the architect and that were making them a big success.

When you are on the management side, you still have to understand the artistic sensibility so that there is a dialogue with the creative side.

Once we decided to do a tower in New York, it had to say something about our group, reflecting the mix of modernity and creativity in our organization. It’s a symbol.

Oh, I was brought up in the north of France, and I had a very enjoyable childhood with my family working as entrepreneur.

I like that combination between creativity and the creative process and the organization needed to make a business like this successful worldwide.

Jackson [Rathbone] is the most artsy, creative and, I think, the most talented.

Creating is a lonely thing in a lot of ways.