I think that the photographer must completely control his picture and bring to it all his personality, and in this area most photographs never transcend being just snapshots. When a great photographer does infuse the snapshot with his personality and vision, it can be transformed into something truly moving and beautiful.

A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.

Art has to address eternal issues.

In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.