At the age of nine I knew that I wanted to become a photographer. Here is why.
I wasn't a very healthy kid, bronchitis and asthma troubled me, so I was sent out to summer camp in the country to gain a little strength. My father gave me a Kodak box camera. It was 1958.
Looking down at the lens on the box, I was fascinated by the image in it; I took pictures of my friends (and the nurse...). That fascination never went away and in that same summer it got company from an angle that I didn't know before. On one occasion a man passed by, saw me with my camera and proposed to make a picture of me. 'I'll tilt the camera a bit, so that on the picture it will look like you're on a slope', he said. And so he did; I still have that picture.
It was the first time I encountered the phenomenon that a picture not only shows what's in front of the lens, but a lot more. It's not always the image itself that is the attraction, but the part that doesn't show on the picture, that's where things really get exciting. It takes place in the head of the viewer. And you can put it there.