I was a make believe ethnographer: treating New Yorkers like an explorer would treat Zulus - searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography.

Sometimes, I'd take shots without aiming, just to see what happened. I'd rush into crowds - bang! bang! ... It must be close to what a fighter feels after jabbing and circling and getting hit, when suddenly there's an opening, and bang! Right on the button. It's a fantastic feeling.

The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn’t relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdotal for me… the kinetic quality of new york, the kids, dirt, madness—I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. Id crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn’t see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News.

Anybody who pretends to be objective isn't realistic.

I came from the outside, the rules of photography didn't interest me.

Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work.

What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life.