“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.

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.

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.

All sedentary workers … suffer from the itch, are a bad colour, and in poor condition … for when the body is not kept moving the blood becomes tainted, its waste matter lodges in the skin, and the condition of the whole body deteriorates.

You can’t teach talent, but you can teach people how to read strenuously and mimic the moves of rock-star writers so that they eventually accumulate a toolbox of skills.

A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.

Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over gain, and you will grow stronger until have accomplished a purpose – not the one you began with perhaps, but one you’ll be glad to remember.

Sometimes we look for those thunderous things to happen in our life for our lives to change or go in the other direction. We seek the miracle. We seek the parting of the seas, the moving of the mountains. But no, its a quiet thing. At least for me it was.

We can see the child moving rather serenely in the uterus. The child senses aggression in its sanctuary. We see the child’s mouth wide open in a silent scream.