Ambition, Arrogance or Dream

These last few days have been filled with one thought, creating a body of work, an important body of work before it is to late. All my life I have dreamed of making photographs that matter, photographs that will be collected and seen and remembered. I guess it is immodest to want something like this but ever since I was a teenager it has been a secret dream of mine.

I want to make my kind of photos, photos I believe in that I feel are important, I want to make portraits of people who will be remembered in the work as well, people who otherwise might be forgotten.

I was thinking of the famous photograph by Seydou Keita of the black man holding the flower in the dapper suit. A man long since forgotten in the world he lived but because of the photograph someone who will be remembered forever.

It is important to do accomplish something with your life, for me that means creating a important body of work, but it is also important probably more so to create records of people who otherwise would live and die and be forgotten, a visual memory of their existence.