“I started making photographs as if I were a child myself. This got me to look at things more closely, more slowly, and from vantage points I hadn’t considered before.”

A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don’t care where it’s going to go.

If you care to look with young eyes.

I try to approach everything that I photograph with this sense of wide-eyed awe.

There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It’s getting very dull now.

The spiritual aspect of my work has more to do with the sense that things in the world can be perceived and accepted as being in some respect alive.

I could finally put into images bottled up feelings of absurdity and alienation – and also joy and delight.

…the very basics of photography [can] be potent and strange. So why not make pictures about the medium itself and see where they would take me?

Photography was so perfectly suited to my sensibility and situation, it gave me a voice, a kind of crazy, out-of-whack voice, at the beginning, but a voice.

It’s important to me to have what I photograph undergo a certain transformation – to become a thing different from what we are used to, to be another version of itself.

At times, I have been convinced that books hold all the material of life–at least all the stuff that fits between an A and a Z.

The thing that makes me want to make pictures now is just looking without many prejudices. The stuff right under your eyes is the most wonderful universe

So, okay photography doesn’t tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.

Giving English to an American is like giving sex to a child.

The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’

It is as if to say: if these are not valued – if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing – are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.

The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access

I know when the time has come to throw it in the trash can. With a child you’ve got to go to therapy and put it in daycare and buy it birthday presents.

He knows it’s important but he doesn’t know what to do with it.

Success isn’t about the biggest house in the world. Success is about loving your family, taking care of your child.

Both childbirth and abortion are medical procedures but neither is an illness, and sometimes they’re both treated as such.