I'm thinking about the end of civilization. We may not keep growing like we are now. There must be an end of civilization. That's what I did as a show at the Palais de Tokyo, the 33 scenarios of how this civilization ends.

The 1,000 Buddha, to me, is almost like a contemporary art piece.

Art and religion have the same origin. Art first, or religion first? Maybe consciousness first! Consciousness always comes with religious feeling and artistic identification. It's the same origin.

I'm inviting the spirits into my photography. It's an act of God.

We need to have nature back in our atmosphere. There might be a turning point of going backward - within a few thousand years we are going back to the Stone Age! There are many scenarios [with] the robot technologies: Humans no longer need to walk; machines can produce products and food and everything. You might not be able to recognize what's false and what is real.

When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan—at least in Japanese. The word shashin, for photograph, combines the characters sha, meaning to reflect or copy, and shin, meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth.

Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world... Photography is a system of saving memories. It's a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time.