Life is one passage and then you keep moving into another state.

Fossils work almost the same way as photography as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography.

I feel that I'm in a very interesting position, where I'm standing back to look at this change, at this moment in history of human beings. If the end of the civilization comes before the end of my life, that's lucky! I want to witness how this big story of humans ends.

I try to never be satisfied; this way I will always be challenging my spirit.

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.

Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions.