On Photography
On photographs:
These are my model, my subject matter.
Photographs are not only points of reference, they’re often triggers of ideas.
Photographs are much less inhibiting than having the subject sitting there before me.
I looked at every type of photograph. I don’t want it to be photographic. I only use photographs as I would use a dictionary in a foreign language.
This may be just my own neurotic sense but I find it less inhibiting to work from them through memory and their photographs than actually having them seated there before me…They inhibit me because, if I like them, I don’t want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private, by which I think I can record the fact of them more clearly.
I very often find that I can work from photographs of my own works that have been done years before, and they become very suggestive