In The West, People Tend To Look

I Still Find Doing Portraits A Terrific Challenge, But Even Though I've Done Hundreds Of Them, I've Never Stopped Questioning The Very Nature Of Portraiture Because It Deals Exclusively With Appearances. I've Never Believed People Are What They Look Like And Think It's Impossible To Really Know What People Are.

Photography Is Very Presumptuous. Photographers Are Always Photographing Other People's Lives - Something They Know Nothing About - And Drawing Great Inferences Into It.

In The West, People Tend To Look At Life As Spectators, But In The East, People Are The Thing.

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.

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.