There's a great scene at the end of Wim Wenders's film Kings of the Road. A diffident traveler arrives at a train station (which happens often in Wenders's films) and approaches a boy sitting against a wall. The man carries nothing but an empty suitcase and a pair of cheap sunglasses, and the boy writes in his notebook. The man asks him what he's writing and the boy replies that he's describing what he sees. The man asks what do you see? And the boy lists the features of his environment: clouds, a fist, an empty briefcase, a smile. The man, smiling, offers the boy his sunglasses and briefcase in exchange for the notebook, and the deal is happily accepted.

I like this scene because the boy does an impossible yet completely routine task in a mere dialogue with a stranger. He makes what he sees into words, like a camera makes what I see into an image. Words do not have to refer to what can be seen, but a photograph is obligated to do precisely that. I think that vision and representation are synonyms in this way, though they don't exactly mean the same thing. I want to make photographs that exploit how they do mean the same thing, and I want to make photographs that exploit how they don't. I want these to be the same photographs.