My Work Is About My

You Can Never Capture A Person In Picture, Never. You Might Get An Interesting Expression Or Gesture. I Almost Never Research A Picture Subject Ahead Of Time. I Think Karsh Is Full Of Baloney. Can You Imagine Spending A Whole Week Out In La Jolla With Jonas Salk Soaking Up His Ambiance, Then Wind Up Making Him Look As If He's In The Studio In Ottawa With His Thumb Under His Chin?

If I Indulge Myself And Surrender To Memory, I Can Still Feel The Knot Of Excitement That Gripped Me As I Turned The Corner Into Rue Mimosas, Looking For The House Of Rene Magritte. It Was August, 1965. I Was 33 Years Old And About To Meet The Man Whose Profound And Witty Surrealist Paintings Had Contradicted My Assumptions About Photography.

How Foolish Of Me To Believe That It Would Be That Easy. I Had Confused The Appearance Of Trees And Automobiles, And People With A Reality Itself, And Believed That A Photograph Of These Appearances To Be A Photograph Of It. It Is A Melancholy Truth That I Will Never Be Able To Photograph It And Can Only Fail. I Am A Reflection Photographing Other Reflections Within A Reflection. To Photograph Reality Is To Photograph Nothing.

The Question Of Truth Is Forever In The Air, And People Look For It With Particular Fervor In Art.

If I Was Concerned About Being Accepted, I Would Have Been Doing Ansel Adams Lookalikes, Because That Was Easily Accepted. Everything I Did Was Never Accepted...but Luckily For Me, My Interest In The Subject And My Passion For The Subject Took Me To The Point That I Wasn't Wounded By That, And Eventually, People Came Around To Me.