“I don’t even like photography at all. I’m just doing photography until I can do something better.” - Nan Goldin 

We think alike! The funniest and candid comment I heard all year from a photographer. 

“We are all of us, unique.  Each unique pattern of creativity, and if we do not fulfill it, it is lost for all time.”  -Martha Graham

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I’d tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn’t really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.  

                                               -Paul Graham     Why Nerds Are Unpopular

Many Hmong believed that when a man died he would be reborn as a woman, and when a woman died, she would be reborn as a man. It was belief in cosmic justice, for the lot of the Hmong woman was always a hard one. The independent spirit of most Hmong women was also a factor, for it was not very difficult to imagine they had once been men.

This explains a lot of things.

Have you ever seen an image or moment and wished you had a camera with you to capture that moment?

Very rarely. I see things all the time that trigger research or give me a visual idea to consider and construct. For me, the camera is not for capturing a moment — it’s the final step atop a layered, calculated process.

                                                                       -Taryn Simon