Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people.

Whether you are Minor White or Robert Frank, almost every photograph starts with an act of pure description - a window. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of the photographer's reflection. The mirror is just another function of the window.

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

[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.

Every once in a while I have this revelation like, "Wow, a hundred years ago the world wasn't black and white." It was in color. Photographed in a certain way, people look from another time. We are just not used to seeing ourselves in that context. Something that's fascinating about photography is you can isolate a moment, tear it out of its context, and see it afresh. Another realization is that, "Wow, there's a big world out there, and people are still doing all sorts of the things that they used to do." We don't just live in iPad land.

I'm a project-based photographer; I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film.

I didn't want to pretend to be a conceptual artist that charges $10,000 for an experience. It's just not what I am. I'm a photographer and I make prints. And people buy a print, and I understand that. But I'm uncomfortable with buying an experience.