My ambition was always to show aspects of daily life as if we were seeing them for the first time.

It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer's true vocation.

My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.

Only powerfully conceived images have the ability to penetrate the memory, to stay there, in short to become unforgettable.

What attracts the photographer is precisely the chance to penetrate inside phenomena, to uncover forms... He pursues them into their last refuges and surprises them at their most positive, their most material and true.

The surrealism of my pictures was nothing but the real made eerie by vision. I was trying to express reality, for there is nothing more surrealist.

Beauty is not the purpose of creation, it is its reward. Its appearance, often late in the day, is no more than an indication that the disrupted equilibrium between man and nature has once again been restored by art. Submitted to this test, what remains of contemporary works of art?