Making these photographs has often seemed to me like a kind of dance. Often I have danced badly and the world has fallen apart at my feet. But sometimes the dance has gone well and my subject and I have moved together as if with shared purpose.

Your ideas come out of the way you conduct your life.

When I started using the extreme short depth of field and single point of focus, I was trying to replicate my changing eyesight. We have binocular vision one eye perceives space from the other. I don't experience a scene visually at F32. It's more like F1.4.

I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.

At a fundamental level photography is much like pointing, and all of us occasionally point at things: look at that, look at that sailboat, look at that tree, etc. etc.

I don't just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments.

You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.

I don't think science is necessarily incompatible with mystical or spiritual sensibilities. I often weigh them equally in my thinking, which sometimes finds itself into the work.

The raw materials of photography are light and time and memory.