Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Photography has saved my life, over and over again.
What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.
Death is sad, yes, but there are some great laughs you can find there.
People want movies to be one thing or another; they want it be fact or fiction.
I've always seen my work as trying to make the connection with men who no one really spends time with.
Things might not get better but they might not get worse. There's something sort of beautiful about that.
I find some comfort in running through the worst-case scenario in my mind and seeing how it's all going to go down.
In general, I wait to be approached. I want to be the one who's hunted, I want to be the one who people take interest in.
I believe that I am some sort of fiction writer and I'm using myself in my work because I'm the person I'm most convenient to use!
Every time I hear that somebody died I think of their body, on a steel table in a morgue somewhere. I think of how they can do nothing about it.
Tenderness and lust are just immature little brothers of love. Yes of course it was lust... but I'm not sure how evolved or resolved that lust was.
I think it's a really good thing to put yourself in a situation where you feel really uncomfortable because I think things can come out of that discomfort.
I wanted to tell stories that moved. Nothing stays the same, and that's why photography is important. The world flickers and changes, and that's why video is important.
It's always a problem - you've got to figure out a place to put your body. You've got to wake up in the morning and deal with the fact that you have this body to lug around.
I'm interested in that hybrid - the place between the real world and my imagination. There's a friction that's created between the things we imagine and the things that exist.
I believe photography is about choosing to live, being brave. Looking is an act of courage. It's terrifying. It's possible to see too much, to witness things that we cannot hold.
Sometimes it's good to get mad, sometimes it clarifies where we stand. I think that art has the ability to challenge and push, and that's great. That's better than great... it's necessary.
I'm always afraid going into strange places, but I also choose carefully and listen to my instincts. These were men I could trust. I'm a pretty good judge of crazy versus sad. I prefer sad.
I would always say I'm doing a video project. About dancing or birthday parties. Of course, the video becomes more than that. It goes deeper than that. But it's not a lie. It's a starting point.
The thing about death is that it's embarrassing. No one wants to focus on it for very long. We're happy to talk about sex all day long but no one wants to talk about the moment where it all ends.
The act of recording requires you to look at and handle and touch things, so yes - art is more than just looking and recording. It's messy and time consuming and people might fall in love and get hurt.
Discomfort and awkwardness are places where you feel things. I'm a big advocate for being happy. We can choose to live in a happy bubble. But part of being happy is understanding how sad things can be.
I feel like the men who end up in my videos, their biggest crime is being lonely. They're not violent, they're not scary people, they're just men who keep to themselves and have a hard time being social.
Although I use myself in my videos, I really see myself as a character. When I look at myself, when I sit and edit, I never think, "That's me." I think, "This is a character, and how do I edit this to tell a story?"
I'm more interested in the idea of role-playing in general than the idea of role-playing in art. I like the childlike quality of making pretend or the optimistic idea of pretending something's happening when it's not.
Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.
I think it's a really good idea to be bumping into all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. So you make art with strangers. You give a reading. You move somewhere new and try to build a life. You grapple with humanity.
Humans like to look. I think that voyeurism and exploitation are often used in the same sentence. But, in my opinion, voyeurism is a beautiful and delightful thing. There is nothing more intimate than really looking at someone.
Polaroid, you know, goes against everything that photography is now. You can't make multiples. Only one exists. I love that. By the way, while we've been talking I've now seen a total of three people I know walking on 8th street.
I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers.
The amazing thing is that we live our lives with the hope that things will go right, that things will happen. And all along the way, we're inspired by the unknown and the unnameable. The minute you can fully describe something it's gone.
I think my work is optimistic - as much as it is pathetic and funny and sad and ridiculous, at the end of the day it's about the hope that something will go right, and the constant wishing for a world where things might start to make sense.
The act of looking is brave. Especially if you look at things you can't handle. I think that most people do not look. If you're really paying attention you could have your heart broken twelve times a day. Most of the time we aren't looking.
Heartbreak is when you're just far enough away from what you desire that you can feel it. Change is the Pangaea moment. I feel like I'm at this point in my life where I have created this place, this island in the ocean, and I'm happy there.
The most amazing moments are when something horrible is about to happen or has just happened. The iceberg falling into the ocean. That aching moment. You can see the pieces, you can see how they fit together, but you can't put them back together.
I have very little interest in endlessly telling people about my artistic process. It sounds like throwing yourself against a wall and crying. It's not interesting to most people. It's interesting to yourself. But it's your problem, not anyone else's.
I think that fact alone levels everything. Slapstick amazes me, the folly of humans today, the Ponzi schemes, giving birth to eight babies at once, it's amazing... And I know, it's horrible to have your money stolen and all that, but those are amazing stories.
Sometimes, photographs live in our hearts as unborn ghosts and we survive not because their shadows find permanence there, but because that thing that is larger than us, larger than the things we can point to, remember and claim, escorts us from dark into light.
A lot of people think that my work is about mocking or making fun of things, but a lot of it is about discomfort and making myself as uncomfortable as the men feel, or putting myself in a situation where I'm revealing my loneliness as much as they're revealing theirs.
I shot my undergraduate work on 35mm. I love the way it looks, but I haven't shot film in a while. If you can avoid scanning, it makes your practice faster. Oh, and I shoot a lot of Polaroid, too. I have about five hundred Polaroids from my film that I hope to show soon.
I feel like I'm at a place in my life where I'm really strangely happy, and in awe of how great the world can be, and I think that's because I have gone through periods of looking at the world through a really melancholy lenses. It's all just flip sides of the same coin.
Also, I'm drawn to moments of ambiguity, when things could go right or they could go wrong. I'm interested in discomfort. Discomfort is a place where we're still close enough to comfort to understand our unhappiness. Most of the things we desire are things that can destroy us.
A lot of people have said that the main thread in my work is loneliness or just wanting to create a world with someone who doesn't really have much in their life, so maybe I'm looking for someone who's lonely and wants to try to create something with me as a subject for my videos.
I never want to make videos with people who don't want to make them with me. I don't want to force people to take part. Only people who want to collaborate. And that's important because otherwise, the videos wouldn't work. Them choosing to take part is very important to the videos.
I think people like to have everything be perfectly morally clear. When the lines get blurred it worries them. I'm not worried. I don't think the men are either. But I think that the videos bring up feelings in people that they don't want to feel. Sometimes people get really mad. That's okay.
I think we're put out into the world to forge relationships with people. Those can be as small as buying coffee from someone or as large as a marriage. The important thing is that we try to make connections or have experiences with other humans. Otherwise what's the point of being on this earth?
A cupcake is like a great pop song. The whole world in less than three minutes. And it's impossible to have a bad cupcake. In New York you walk everywhere. So I'm always looking, always on the eternal search for the perfect cupcake. I take them very seriously. It's like hunting and gathering for me.
[Photography] ties back into this feeling of wanting to watch things fall and the moment before they break. Fireworks are that way for me - this lovely thing that blows up and is gone. It all goes back to this desire to record things before they disappear - the original reason we take pictures, right?
Well, my intention is to make work about being uncomfortable. About being in a world that isn't always the world you want to be part of. I talk a lot about the free fall, the moment in the scene where gravity takes over, and the beautiful awkwardness when gravity wins. Gravity is hilarious. Gravity always wins.
There's such an energy created when the world is turned upside down, and when things are good again it's nice to take note. Then it goes away. Change. Change means friction. Friction happens where things aren't quite right, when everything is separating, when nothing is the same. Later you piece it back together.