Dates can be important. It's a nice way to remember when I took the photo without having to rack my brain or look in the archives. It also makes every photo important, because there is the date. I can take a picture of nothing, but at least we know when I took it.

In New York, unlike Holland, there are newspaper stands on every corner. That was a big headline all over the city.

I do feel a kinship with anthropology or ethnography, although when you hear those terms you think of something exotic. Generally, photographic anthropology has that taste of the faraway or undiscovered place. But my anthropology has more to do with what's in my reach.

A lot of my work comes through accidents or circumstances that just happen to present themselves. I have to realize that something is presenting itself. Otherwise it slips right by.

My photography has really always been about what I feel I'm getting out of it. What people on the outside get doesn't concern me.

In Holland, things were pretty stale for me. Even though there were a lot of good influences and a certain openness to music and art and literature, I just wanted to go somewhere less familiar - somewhere bigger.

I'm pretty solitary when I take pictures. Even when I take pictures of people, I just go about my own way of doing it.