Gillian Wearing
[Artist, b. 1963, Birmingham, England, lives in London.]
I taught myself to use a camera—it’s not very difficult to use a camera, but I never bothered looking at any textbooks on how to make a picture. I had a much more casual relation to it. For me at the time it was much more about the process rather than the results.
If you ever make anything too literal you might as well forget it. It loses everything.
Negative or traumatic experience in childhood or youth and willing to talk about it on film. Identity will be concealed. (Advertisement placed in London newspaper for the project “Trauma.”)
When I began taking photographs I thought they might work better in magazines, in a journalistic sense, rather than as art.