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.

As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise - who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.

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

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 feel that whatever picture an artist makes it is in part a picture of himself - a matter of identity.

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.

All important pictures embody something that we do not yet understand.