Art is the one place we all turn to for solace.

How you get work done is by exploiting yourself and your feelings, and sometimes people get in the way.

I really like the structure of my body. It moves well, it looks good, it photographs well, it understands gesture and nuance.

You know, artists are influenced by other artists. We're all deeply influenced by what's around us; we don't make anything cold. Sometimes we think that we do. But within that, the most important part is that even though we're influenced, what are the levels of invention that we carry forth even as we've been influenced by something that's come before?

Sometimes my work needs to be photographic, sometimes it needs words, sometimes it needs to have a relationship to music, sometimes it needs to have all three and become a video projection.

Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.

It's fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility - this too is part of the work, is indeed central to [my photographs]... This invisibility - this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time - is the greatest source of my longing.