I Never Went To A Photography School,

Flowers Construct The Most Charming Geometries: Circles Like The Sun, Ovals, Cones, Curlicues And A Variety Of Triangular Eccentricities, Which When Viewed With The Eye Of A Magnifying Glass Seem A Lilliputian Frieze Of Psychedelic Silhouettes.

I Think Photographs Should Be Provocative And Not Tell You What You Already Know. It Takes No Great Powers Or Magic To Reproduce Somebody's Face In A Photograph. The Magic Is In Seeing People In New Ways.

How Foolish Of Me To Believe That It Would Be That Easy. I Had Confused The Appearance Of Trees And Automobiles, And People With A Reality Itself, And Believed That A Photograph Of These Appearances To Be A Photograph Of It. It Is A Melancholy Truth That I Will Never Be Able To Photograph It And Can Only Fail. I Am A Reflection Photographing Other Reflections Within A Reflection. To Photograph Reality Is To Photograph Nothing.

If I Indulge Myself And Surrender To Memory, I Can Still Feel The Knot Of Excitement That Gripped Me As I Turned The Corner Into Rue Mimosas, Looking For The House Of Rene Magritte. It Was August, 1965. I Was 33 Years Old And About To Meet The Man Whose Profound And Witty Surrealist Paintings Had Contradicted My Assumptions About Photography.

If I Was Concerned About Being Accepted, I Would Have Been Doing Ansel Adams Lookalikes, Because That Was Easily Accepted. Everything I Did Was Never Accepted...but Luckily For Me, My Interest In The Subject And My Passion For The Subject Took Me To The Point That I Wasn't Wounded By That, And Eventually, People Came Around To Me.