It's good to be around people who see [photography] as a reasonable enterprise when everyone in the neighborhood may think it's ridiculous. (On the benefit of teaching photography)

I don't look for things to see how they function as metaphors.... You can't photograph the sublime. You can only traffic in the specific and its relationship to the symbolic.

In all my work there's this notion of the melancholic. You can make a photograph about the sublime, but you can't make the sublime itself.

I really don't worry too much about what I see through the viewfinder, at least not at that point, especially if I'm using a flash because I don't know what it's going to do. I just see vague potentiality. It's really working with a set of attributes that will hopefully interact in an interesting way.