He sits behind the blue kitchen table smoking. One thing I won’t answer is anything about why I do what I do. I make uncomplicated, direct photographs of complicated and difficult subjects. My work comes out of my life. I like people who dare, people who push themselves to some extreme. What I do is something old, something that has, however dead now, a tradition behind it, people like Julia Margaret Cameron, or Mathew Brady. I compose the picture in the camera. I make the print. And it has to be beautiful, or else I throw it out. I can express myself in truth only through my art. I finished high school in Manhattan in 1953. I worked for fifteen years as an assistant to commercial photographers. They let me use their studios, they let me use their darkrooms after hours. After 1963 I never left New York. I tried to make it as a freelancer in the worlds of advertising, fashion, music, but it didn’t really work, the hustle wasn’t right for me, and in 1973 I moved to Twelfth and Second Avenue, into this loft above the old Eden Theatre, where I’ve been working ever since.
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