The challenge of photography is to show the thing photographed so that our feelings are awakened and hidden aspects are revealed to us

I feel that whatever picture an artist makes it is in part a picture of himself - a matter of identity.

I want my photographs to say: Look-there's this thing you haven't seen that you should see.

We tremble at the feelings we experience as our sense of wholeness is reorganized by what we see.

Of course, this is one of the really important things about art, that you can make more than you can understand at the moment the thing is being made. But the gap between what we recognize inside ourselves - our feelings- and our ability to trust ourselves and to trust exposing ourselves to those ideas, can be great.

Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.

You’re always working at the margin of what you don’t understand, that’s the only exhilarating place to be. To just illustrate what you already know is condescending, and a waste of your time.

I was going round the world searching for an interesting place, when I realized that the place that I was in was already interesting.

This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.

The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly.

The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don't know, or already know and should take seriously.

Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'

I made 10 times as many images as the other students, he says of the early years. I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can't afford to waste time: take it seriously.