What is a photograph? For me, a fragment of quick-silver, a lucid dream, a scribbled note from the subconscious to be deciphered, perhaps, over years. It is a monologue trying to become a conversation, an offering, an alibi, a salute.

After I have photographed the way I like to, I feel as I might if I had been making love all day, marvelous and exhausted and wanting to collapse on the floor in a heap. That's why I can't photograph just anybody, and why it's so hard to photograph people on assignment it's like going to bed with someone not of my choosing.

That's all the difficulty and the challenge and the battle: to look through this mechanical thing, these bits of glass and metal, at someone. And not lose the sense that this shape is a human being.