The ability to keep things in perspective is very important for a journalist. In a tense situation you need the ability to be there, yet somehow step aside; to keep a cool head and keep working without getting frustrated.

When Bill Gates started Corbis we were told that he needed images to fill those digital picture frames in his home, and many found this plausible. But now it's pretty clear that he's set out to control the visual history of the twentieth century.

What we get to think and know about the world is in the hands of a very few... A truly informed public is antithetical to the interests of modern consumer capital.

Let's assume that all the cassettes of monochrome film Cartier-Bresson ever exposed had somehow been surreptitiously loaded with colour film. I'd venture to say that about two thirds of his pictures would be ruined and the remainder unaffected, neither spoiled nor improved. And perhaps one in a thousand enhanced.

The only thing we photographers really want more than life, more than sex, more than anything, is to be invisible.

The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten.

[Photojournalism] really is the only branch of photography that's a credit to our profession. We see, we understand; we see more, we understand more.