I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn't go to it out of hunger.
I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.
I have never been sorry to see my sets being struck, provided they are well photographed. They're not works of art but part of making a film.
I am a professional photographer because it is the best way I know to earn the money I require to take care of my wife and children.
I was the official wedding photographer at one of my best friends' weddings. Fortunately she was one of the most easygoing brides ever, so she made it easy for me.
I was obsessed from the moment I took my first photograph. I wanted to make photography my career.
Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
Friends told me not to bother with the silents - they're jerky, poorly photographed and ludicrously badly acted. But I was immediately struck by the freshness and vitality of these films.
People taking photographs of their meals are not critics; they are from the United States.
My wife sent her photograph to the lonely hearts club. They sent it back, said they weren't that lonely.
I'm much more about the emotion that a photograph provokes out of you and less about how technically brilliant it is.
Everyone I'm photographing, I feel like I'm remaking a family, in a way. My brothers and sisters are my heroes. So many of my models resemble them.
My knowledge of the state of President Roosevelt's health was derived entirely from conversations, from newspaper articles and from photographs.
I always give a print to everybody I photograph, and some of my subjects have told me they have a hard time hanging them up at home.
Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates.
One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it.
I was looking at a photograph of the 1997 election campaign yesterday, and I thought: 'My God. Did I really have that hairstyle? And that Tory blue suit?'
But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living.
One of my challenges was to try to photograph the Great Wall of China. And I did actually take some photos, but it was hard to discern the wall with the naked eye.
There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.
