[Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.

In a world where the 2 billionth photograph has been uploaded to Flickr, which looks like an Eggleston picture! How do you deal with making photographs with the tens of thousands of photographs being uploaded to Facebook every second, how do you manage that? How do you contribute to that? What's the point?

Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people.

I've never been the type of photographer to live with people I photograph. You know, shoot heroin with them, that kind of thing. I respect those photographers that work that way. But part of my personality is a certain amount of distance, and part of my attraction to the medium of photography is this distance where you're in the world, but you're removed from it.

The reason I often say, for me, photography is analogous to poetry, for my kind of work more so than journalism, is because it's so open to interpretation. And I'm very happy having different interpretations of it.

People can talk about the death of social life or whatever; it's not necessarily how I see it. It's more musical in the sense, where it's a feeling about the place I live, slash, who I am in the place.

Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.