“At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one’s own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person’s skin.”

I like to be flexible in the way I take pictures. I do not use a tripod, and I move around in the crowd, of which I am myself part….

I don’t see myself as a documentary photographer. I am more drawn to the image itself, rather than to the description of a scene. And, anyway, every image only halfway represents reality, whereas the other half is rather, more or less, fulfilling our imagination.

I try to preserve the dynamics of the street, and my way of using the camera tries to approximate as much as possible the way we see: focusing on details, opening up to wider angles, and composing all these very short, fragmented impressions into a larger mental picture.

My work doesn’t speak about individuals (it’s not portraiture in the traditional sense), it tries to speak about life in general in cities of the West – which is where I live and what I understand.

I certainly and deliberately introduced a great deal of variety into the people in the clamshell, which I suppose grows out of growing up in an individualistic society we profess to have.

Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one’s individuality.

Fashion can be bought by anybody; style takes discernment, it has to do with individuality.

Government is not a substitute for people, but simply the instrument through which they act. And if the individual fails to do his duty as a citizen, government becomes a very deadly instrument indeed.

The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.

Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.

They are a very extensive minority who have suffered discrimination and who have the same right to participation in the promise and fruits of society as every other individual.

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed…It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.