Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?
My life is more important. At this point in my life I'm alone. I don't think about it a lot.
I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.
My desire is to preserve the sense of people’s lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty I see in them. I want the people in my pictures to stare back.
A lot of people seem to think that art or photography is about the way things look, or the surface of things. That's not what it's about for me. It's really about relationships and feelings. . . it's really hard for me to do commercial work because people kind of want me to do a Nan Goldin. They don't understand that it's not about a style or a look or a setup. It's about emotional obsession and empathy.
For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody - it's a caress… I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.
Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.
Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng's clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, 0 Lord, Creator, Hallowed one, You still, hour by hour sustain it.
Alan, you seem to think we won't like you unless you do things just like everyone else. Have you ever thought we might like you because you're different?
Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor.
I've been active all my life. In 1990 I retired from my firm, I. M. Pei & Partners, and for two years I didn't do much. Then I started to get kind of antsy, so I decided, I'm going to do some more work. And I chose to do work outside the U. S. because I've spent 45 years here and I wanted to learn more about what's happening in the rest of the world.