I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.

Sharpness is overrated.

How do you find a way to say what an extraordinary experience it is to be alive in this world? That is the kind of subject matter I try to work with.

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 don't just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments.

At a fundamental level photography is much like pointing, and all of us occasionally point at things: look at that, look at that sailboat, look at that tree, etc. etc.

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