The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.

How many pictures have you torn up because you hate them? What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable - and they're screaming the next minute. I've never seen a family album of screaming people.

People — running from unhappiness, hiding in power — are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.

Faces are the ledgers of our experience.

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.

My photographs don't go below the surface. They don't go below anything. They're readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.