What Makes a Photographer When Everyone Is Taking Pictures?
I’m 83 years old now. I moved into this building in 1963. And it’s rent-controlled. And it’s a landmark building, and I’m a senior citizen. So, I don’t pay much rent. That’s the only reason I can live here at all.
I don’t have a favorite place to take photographs or even a favorite subject. I carry a camera. If I go out into the hallway, I carry a camera with me.
When I was in Paris, I was 23, I think, and I wanted to shoot everything I saw, but I didn’t have enough money to buy, like, more than like a roll of film every two weeks. And somebody said that Chet Baker was playing over at the American club. And I went over and I took two pictures, and one of them is out of focus, and the other one is a great photo.
I’m not a concerned photographer. I’m not trying to prove anything in any way politically or otherwise. I’m interested in beauty and sort of the subtle moments of everyday life.
This picture was called “The Regular.” The chairs in the foreground are overlapping, overlapping planes in parallel recession. This picture, I just call it “Washington Square.” Laboratories tend to print it light, but it should be dark like this.
Grand Central Station, I don’t know why there was only one person walking in there. I had just gotten off the train. I call this “Firemen.” The arch had caved in on five firemen. The Metropolitan Museum chose this to be in the permanent collection.
There are a lot of things that make a good photograph. You have to think about texture and gesture and composition, and all the things that painting has in it. Technology doesn’t change the way photography is. It just — it makes it available to more people, which means there’s going to be much, much more really terrible pictures taken or pictures that are totally dependent on subject, which is all, all right.
If you were there when the Hindenburg caught on fire, and you took a picture of it, that’s a great photograph. But you’re not a great photographer, because you can’t repeat that in everyday things.
What a great photographer does is, they are consistently able to make something in a style that’s personal to themselves. My pictures don’t depend on extreme sharpness. They depend on the composition and on the subject and on the way I see it.
