The sense of invention. I think photography by and large is an art, but it will be considered a minor art because as practised by most photographers it lacks the essential ingredient of all major art, total invention. When a writer comes to a piece of empty paper, everything that goes on the paper he imagines. When a painter comes to an empty canvas, everything that he draws and paints on that canvas is a total invention. Photographers walk around with a camera, looking for something that looks like a photograph, to take a picture of. I’m talking about reportage. The point I’m making is that what I did grew out of the need to express something, because what interested me was always life after death. My whole life is preparing myself for my death. My inquiries, the way I view and question life, is all about the nature of life, but you can’t examine the nature of life without wondering about the nature of death. It’s yin and yang, you can’t separate the one from the other. And, since we spend more time not being than we do being, then I find not being utterly fascinating. In a universe of three trillion million years, we spend 80 years alive, a nanosecond of breath which is our consciousness, and we spend this time unexamined. Most people are not even alive, they’re on automatic, totally, with no consciousness of being. It’s the same with photographers. They look but they don’t pay attention, and what they see is what they’re told it’s OK to see by critics or by official bona fide certifiers of photographs. But they’re also examining somebody else’s life, something they know nothing about. They hardly know anything about their own lives, and it’s presumptuous for me to go to Harlem and photograph black people and pretend I know anything about them. But they only see in clichés. We live our lives in terms of clichés. We live very second-hand lives.You know what it’s like? It’s like reading a hundred love stories, and then falling in love. It’s two different things, two different experiences. Photographers are artists reading love stories, they’re always looking at other people’s emotions, other people’s passions without really knowing their own true passions, which is harder to do. All of that is how much of my writing comes about, like when I say “what is the universe?” That’s a big question. Who the hell knows what the universe is? I still don’t know. If you ask that question five years from now, my answer would be different. I’ve already rewritten some of those things, the texts that go with my photographs, and that’s what I love, the continuity of the imagination and the expansion of the imagination. I keep absorbing. At 64, my mind is better than it’s ever been in my whole life, my imagination is better, there’s no end in sight. My mind is so ripe now than what it was ten years ago, and I expect it to be better ten years from now, and it’ll happen because I expect it to happen. I program myself to do that. I’ve always done that, and I’ve gotten everything I’ve wanted because I’ve believed it was possible and then I went out and made it happen. It’s all a matter of programming myself. The Catholic Church programmed me to be a perfect Catholic, totally. That’s why I had to unlearn the first twenty years of my life and I had to realise that I wasn’t my mother and my father. When I stopped seeing them as Mom and Dad, and I started seeing them as John and Margaret, two screwed up people having to deal with their own problems, life became more realistic, and it was a much healthier relationship. I questioned my way out of the Catholic Church, simply asked questions, and more questions, and found their answers ridiculous. So what do you believe in? That’s how these questions came about. People don’t ask questions, and they’re completely brainwashed. You have to let them know that it’s their birthright. I tell these kids at school “listen, if you leave this institution asking fewer questions than when you arrived, you haven’t been educated”. You can’t go through life bowing your head and accepting what someone in supposed authority tells you. That’s being an automaton. The great marvel of being alive is that one does have the right to ask questions and be audacious in the questions. But, authority does not like anybody to ask questions.
