I am pessimistic about a picture's power to be the emissary of just one thing. What I hope is that the picture says, "Here I am, this is what I am like," and the person seeing the picture says in return, 'You know a lot but you don't know half of what I know.'

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.

We tremble at the feelings we experience as our sense of wholeness is reorganized by what we see.

What's great is that the picture is already taken before it goes public. It's in secret. The trust that develops from such a habit engenders risk, and you realise you're not as vulnerable as you thought. Once you become comfortable with being more truthful about who you are, the easier it is, the prouder you become. That's the way it unfolded for us.

The challenge of photography is to show the thing photographed so that our feelings are awakened and hidden aspects are revealed to us

The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don't know, or already know and should take seriously.

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.