I never had any ambition to do anything commercial, anything journalistic. I wanted to be an artist, and I wanted to be an artist whose work was done in the medium of photography. It may be debatable to this day whether I ever succeeded in achieving that ambition, but the point is, I never had any uncertainty about that.

I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.

I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.

I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be photographic.

It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film.

I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

The photobook occupies that deep area between the novel and the film.