Your ideas come out of the way you conduct your life.

Poetry at least in my own life, is really about your own mortality. Everything in poetry makes me think of my mortality. It is not a dark thing in life; it prepares you for the graceful things that happen in your life. It gives me a license to make any kind of picture I want with great courage.

When I started using the extreme short depth of field and single point of focus, I was trying to replicate my changing eyesight. We have binocular vision; one eye perceives space from the other. I don't experience a scene visually at F32. It's more like F1.4.

Making these photographs has often seemed to me like a kind of dance. Often I have danced badly and the world has fallen apart at my feet. But sometimes the dance has gone well and my subject and I have moved together as if with shared purpose.

I love the history of photography and one process has always replaced another. However, very, very few have disappeared.

You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".