Teaching has never been far from my life. It's the most natural thing I do. Apparently as I said I cannot not do it.
Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.
I would like to go to Antarctica. That's about all.
[In the late 80's] that's the first time I heard about that astonishing idea [that most photographs would be taken on telephones]. And now I've been watching the tsunami of images.
There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.
For sheer majestic geography and sublime scale nothing beats Alaska and the Yukon. For culture Japan. And for all-around affection Australia.
A very big part of the life of a photograph is the afterlife.
Aboriginal Australia is a tough place to work rough and tough.
My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front and then populate the picture.
What I'm interested in is modern American history. I'm taken with the changes that have occurred in America in my lifetime.
My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.
The best lesson I was given is that all of life teaches especially if we have that expectation.
I had a book come out several years ago when there were no blogs. This is a mark to me about how the environment has changed.
My father taught me photography. It was his hobby and we had a small darkroom in the fruit cellar of our basement. It was the kind of makeshift darkroom that was only dark at night.
My connection to Santa Fe is very closely and continuously a connection with Reid. I believe in him and his philosophy of photographic education.
I was known as a 35-mm photographer with a view-camera mentality.
Typically I see it with photographers who go to a place like India or Nepal and everything's so colorful and exotic and they think therefore a picture's been taken.
I now want to be a photographer of my time and our common culture.
Editorial photography has to be energetic and visually competitive.
It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use.
Life rarely presents fully finished photographs. An image evolves often from a single strand of visual interest - a distant horizon a moment of light a held expression.
Actually ambition won't get you that far. You'll shift gears. You'll see something that's shinier. But if you believe... then you're the long-distance runner.
For example in my dorm at the University of Kentucky I had the only camera. I don't think anyone came to college with a camera other than me.
It's more difficult now to be a Geographic photographer than it was when I came along. And it wasn't easy at that time.
There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing.
Essentially what photography is is life lit up.
I wanted life to be episodic. I wanted to be a magazine photographer and I was willing to do what it took to become that.
I'm very involved in photographing America now so I don't think of faraway places as I did when I was young.
Richard Prince's most famous photograph was made by me.
People say to me "Who's your favorite kind of photographer?" Or "Who would be your favorite photographer to have in a workshop?" And I always say "My Dad.
Increasingly it's people not interested in National Geographic.
My least favorite photographer to have would be myself. Someone who wanted a career at National Geographic. Because it's almost mathematically impossible to achieve that.
It actually has transcended my career at the Geographic so that when my career there ended I had momentum as a teacher and a belief in photographic education at the workshop level.
Even though I teach with 35mm my method takes people by surprise because it isn't fast and it isn't about hardware or software or even great results. It's about great process.
A mad keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.
Photography alone of the arts seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.
I had luck but I worked hard and I suffered. It's not just photography I'm talking about. It's about whatever dream you want it to be.
We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.
[ My time and our common culture] it's what I'm photographing and I'm very involved with that.
The longer we lived with it the more we wanted something less about process and more about life.
The unusual wins out over the usual.
That's who comes to my workshops. I jokingly tell my students that the class could be called "Your photographs: Better.