A photograph has edges the world does not.

I think I misunderstood Instagram and just thought it was people photographing their friends, and discovered there were a number of people, a number of artists, who were taking it very seriously and doing very imaginative work with Instagram as the medium.

I realize that as I get more experience as I get older, my perception changes and that feeds the photograph.

There's something essentially fictive about a photograph. That doesn't mean that if you understand that, and you understand how the world is transformed by the camera, that you can't use the limitations or the transformation to have an observation that is a very subtle perception of the world.

I have to be reminded, “’It’s your son’s birthday party. Bring a camera.’ And then, when I’m there, ‘Take a picture,’ because it doesn’t occur to me to use it as this memorializing thing.

I discovered that this camera was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness. And it's that awareness of really looking at the everyday world with clear and focused attention that I'm interested in.

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus.