35mm Tyrant? Moi?

PEOPLE WHO THINK and write seriously about photography don’t have much time for pictures or the people who make them. Mainstream publications like The New York Times question the “mind-numbing tyranny of the image.” The Museum of Modern Art brags about putting on a show where the artists “are not primarily interested in images.” The catalog to MoMA’s annual New Photographers show describes the mistrust of the photographic image as “orthodox” and “standardized by the academic establishment.”

I disagree. For me, images come first. Their existence precedes their essence, as an existential philosopher might say. Viewers react differently to my pictures, and those many different reactions are proof that, if nothing else, my pictures aren’t tyrannical.

The art form has its problems, of course. It would be a better world if a million Web sites didn’t post a billion pictures every day. The belief that a moment must be recorded to be lived is not a happy one. But a photographer, it seems to me, must make a leap of faith, must believe that photography has a particular genius that rises above mass consumption and consumerism, a genius that Instagram can’t destroy.

When I first started shooting, I was living in New York City. I shot street photography because street photography matches New York like fresco matches Florence. The city just wants to be shot in black-and-white, with a touch of motion blur. If only people still wore hats.

After a couple of years, my fake Cartier-Bressons got better, but I realized that I didn’t have much to say about the subject that was new. Also, I wanted to be taken seriously, and as long as I was shooting street, that wasn’t going to happen.

So, I put aside the imaginary Leica, the one I could never afford, and I slowed down. When I did so, I found that the demands of the moment gave way to a consideration of time. Garry Winogrand said that it’s impossible to capture time—narrative, what happened before or after the shutter trips—in a still image. But by working the angles and sneaking up on it, that’s exactly what I hope to do.