Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.

I made 10 times as many images as the other students," he says of the early years. "I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can't afford to waste time: take it seriously.

Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'

I want my photographs to say: "Look-there's this thing you haven't seen that you should see."

You’re always working at the margin of what you don’t understand, that’s the only exhilarating place to be. To just illustrate what you already know is condescending, and a waste of your time.

The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly.

For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another.