From my diary, 4th April 1984
Most of these moments – or rather most of the slides on which they are recorded – will end up in the blue plastic bowl that lies under my projection table in Boulogne and serves as a rubbish bin. A few will survive my editing, my wife’s criticism, the objections of some of my friends, and eventually become entities on their own, almost separated from me, less and less dependent on my judgment. But while I am riding in the New York subway, to some destination whose name means nothing to me and which I’ll probably never reach, because I’ll get off at a random station, to follow some commuter whose look has intrigued me, these moments still seem undifferentiated: are the ones when I press that button really more significant than the others? Sometimes I miss a shot because the shutter isn’t properly cocked or because the light is too dim to adjust the settings. I hardly regret it, it’s no more than a grain of a raw material of which there is plenty and that seems easy to replace. But three weeks from now, in my projection room, a delay of a fraction of a second, a shift of a few centimetres, to the right or the left, will make all the difference between a good photograph and a disappointment.
