Burke Uzzle
[Photographer, b. 1938, Raleigh, North Carolina, lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.]

 A photographer’s best pictures are from deep inside him, and also some of the worst. Some photographers enjoy distinguished careers without ever taking personal photographs. Others, audaciously and arrogantly and courageously discharge their most private feelings through photography. Trouble is, sometimes it all adds up to baloney. 
 I had my young eyes opened by the impersonal blood and guts of news photography. I was running the gamut every low man on the totem pole runs—country clubs to mass murder. 
 You see a fleeting perfection of form merging with a significant substance, and you make a clicking noise only a hair’s breadth away. You have judged something, reported something, ostensibly truthfully… And when you made a clicking noise you said something eloquently if you are skilled. 
 After all these years of wandering around as a street photographer and a journalist, I decided that this world is such a curious, screwed up place so full of contradictions... that I couldn’t look at it any more in the raw form without trying to find some way of balancing it in a more philosophical context—less in a reportorial manner and more in an artistic one.