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One becomes photographer by accident.

The first time I ever trapped a child's face in a little black box I was hardly older than him. Could I know! That day I definitely trapped myself and nothing up to now came to release me. An old camera, a few school friends, a hundred shots. The pictures were real even moving. But awkward. A few years later, after a gap, the need came back to deepen what had been perceived in a moment of grace: Pictures from child to child without any distance or savoir faire.

As time went by I slowly controlled the technique ensuring to the capture of faces and bodies, a greater mastery. But grace against skill, craft against feeling.
I so became a photographer jibbing at the work: Photography itself, its complex chemical works aside its expensive manufacture don't really bother me. But what has bound me to it, and for long is its nearly magic power to reveal instants I really lived.

<< I was there; This is what I seen. >>

Two boys play on a roof top. A little girl, motionless, naked, stands in a golden glow. Swimming pool's changing room. A summer's barn. A puddle where one can turn over and over, naked again. Peculiar, these pictures of everyday life? When they have the chance, children virulently express - all the more efficiently that they have lacked listening - that they soak in a purely sensual reality. The understanding will later surpass.

Should it be so - because I cope with childhood - should I show the usual, the conventional imagery? Some others do it perfectly: Object-children, mirror-children, alibi-children definitely out of childhood. Here every picture tries to bring you back to another childhood: unknown, primitive, rebels. Far away from Ice-Cream-Cones-and-That-all-Folks. Each encounter yearns to renew back with the real life.

So GASP! says Norman Normal: The child has a body, a voice, an odor...

©NEGREPONT