[b. 1946] American filmmaker, actor, writer, and artist
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I hate it when people say, “I’m an artist.” I think, well, I’ll be the judge of that. And I don’t think “artist” is a job description. It’s a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I’m not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography.
For most people, the word voyeur is a bad word; to me, it’s a realistic one. Whatever your secret obsession is, that’s what you need to look at again and again and again. It doesn’t matter what it is. Was Ansel Adams—who spent a lifetime looking at mountains, making pictures, and getting off on them—a voyeur?
The way I photograph... in many ways it’s directed by chance and all my mistakes, which are often the best stuff. I found that no matter if it’s the same tape, the same TV, and the same camera, I can never duplicate an image... your arm jiggles, there’s just too much chance. And I never put it on pause, or use any of that fancy equipment.
My photographs are not really about photography. They are about editing. I use photography but they are all taken from the TV screen. Anybody can do that, but it's the order I put the pictures in to try to create a new kind of movie, something that you can put on your wall.
Watching a movie should be like hunting. Out of context, every image of the cinema is yours for a split second. Take them before they bury it.
