It’s easy to draw a parallel between the frame of the picture and the forms of poetry. Within these limitations — with these poets at any rate — there’s a great intensity of expression. That was what I was trying to find — something at once specific (I’d see someone in the street with a chair on his head, and I’d think of the Goya print of the same subject) and very general (related to a tragic sense of life). There are a lot of pictures of kids playing in ruins, and of the Semana Santa.

Were you seeking Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”?

Yes. You wait and wait and wait, and watch and watch and watch.

When you came back from Europe, you met Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand.

Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958) determined more than any other book the shape of photography in postwar New York. It described an America that was more like a Rimbaud poem than Life magazine. He really raised the bar.

But it was in Garry Winogrand that I discovered another way of working. Watching him I realized that the world offers more than certain moments — it’s constantly exploding with moments.

You attended workshops at Winogrand's house in the mid-1960s. Do you consider him a mentor?

The whole question of mentorship or influence is very interesting. If you have a talented student, they don’t respond to the mentor’s work simply because of circumstance. It wasn’t that I met Garry and we became friends and therefore I did or didn’t do certain things. The fact is that I identified something in his work that struck me very deeply. The first time he invited me to his house, he showed me huge piles of prints, and I was dumbfounded. I had thought that American photography was pretty much dead, that Robert Frank had throttled it, but I realized this wasn’t true at all and that Garry was moving it somewhere else. I came into his house thinking that what I really wanted to do was work in film — I left realizing that photography was still possible.

Which brings us to the work that’s now assembled in Passing through Eden.

The Central Park work was a ratification of what I learned from Garry. I changed my style, though the method was very much like the early work. Because of the training I’d had I was often able to take a single picture and have it be [compositionally] precise.

You’re clearly very proud of those pictures.

In my estimation, anybody going through that book and looking at, say, the pictures of people on the park benches will be completely amazed by them. The precision of the pictures, one after another, is a tour de force. I’m very proud of both books.

You’re also a believer in good photography coming out of hard work. Is it 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration?

It’s 90 percent desperation! I remember once talking to Garry in a moment of despair about my work and he said, “The only thing I know, Tod, is that all great work is the result of great labor.” It’s the nature of the medium. You go out and spend hours in the street; then you develop the film, contact the negatives, and edit some to print. Snapping the shutter creates this trail of labor. It comes out of your passion for the thing.

Something else Garry used to say about photography was, “It’s worthwhile work for a grown man.” This ridiculous-seeming activity of walking along the street and lifting up a little camera is so powerful, so complicated, and so resistant to being mastered. If I had the choice between doing that and sitting in an office somewhere … Are you kidding?