As an adolescent who had just picked up a camera I had a very immodest ambition: to photograph a forest and make the image look pornographic. Or the opposite: take a picture of a sex act and communicate the serenity of a landscape. Only half-knowing it at the time I was longing to escape the tyranny of subject matter — an ambition that taken to its end can lead a photographer to madness ... or to pure abstraction.
Not surprisingly, 20 years later most of my photographs stay on the edge of abstraction. In the time passed I have learned that one pursues mad, impossible dreams without thinking about them. The sharpshooter taking aim at an invisible target is well-advised to keep his eyes firmly closed.
Rafaelo Kazakov, 2000, New York City