From the car

How often have you been in your car going somewhere when you see some seemingly insignificant event which instantly grabs your attention? You turn to whoever is in the car and say, “Quick, look at that!” And then it’s too late. You’ve passed it, and the brief glimpse becomes too vague to describe to whomever is in the car with you. You saw something, and it went in deeply to that vulnerable place we hold for epiphanies. But there was no way to go back to see what had already disappeared. I began to understand that the car itself was the camera, with me inside it, and all I had to do was to raise my Leica and blink to make a photograph. Many of these photographs appeared in my 1968 exhibition at MoMA, and have been seen in many other museum shows and several books.