I don't pretend to be an intellectual or a philosopher. I just look.

I don't like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.

It never seemed important to me that my photos be published. It's important that I take them. There were periods where I didn't have money, and I would imagine that someone would come to me and say: 'Here is money, you can go do your photography, but you must not show it.' I would have accepted right away. On the other hand, if someone had come to me saying: 'Here is money to do your photography, but after your death it must be destroyed,' I would have refused.

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, "Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer."

I photograph only something that has to do with me, and I never did anything that I did not want to do. I do not do editorial and I never do advertising. No, my freedom is something I do not give away easily.

For me what photographers say about their photos doesn’t have any importance. For me it is just enough to look at the pictures. Many times - for the boring pictures - people have to say so many things about them to show you there is something to them when many times there is nothing.

I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the view itself.