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

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

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.

I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

I didnt know photography would take me to the places that it has taken me

It's very important for me to really use this body as a barometer of a certain kind of knowledge--to take the personal risk of exposing my own body in a certain kind of way. I can't ask anybody else to do something that I don't do first myself.