Chip Simons
[Photographer, b. 1958, Ohio, lives in Bosque Farms, New Mexico.]
One way to keep growing is to make mistakes. Sometimes I’ll take fifty pictures a night, working through all these crazy ideas, running into stuff I never could have predicted. I’m making all kinds of great mistakes, and, I think, that’s so funny how this happened. If you just go out and take a lot of pictures, you learn and you grow. Accidents happen.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I haven’t a clue. That’s why my stuff looks so weird. I’m pretty much untrained, and I thrive on mistakes.
Timothy Leary called me a “Shamanistic light dancer,” most people just call me “weird”... as long as they just call me... it’s okay.
We know [the dogs] are just sniffing at the camera, that there’s no personality or real intelligence in those apparently meaningful looks, but it’s what we want to believe that’s important. Photography’s the biggest lie ever, and the dog pictures are the believable lie.
