The sign at the entrance to my gym locker room says, no cell phones please, cell phones are cameras. They are not. A camera is a Nikon or a Leica or Rolleiflex, and when you strike someone with one, they know they have been hit with something substantial.

The use of the camera has always been for me a tool of investigation, a reason to travel, to not mind my own business, and often to get into trouble.

The pictures do not ask you to help these people, but something much more difficult; to be briefly, intensely aware of their existence, an existence as real and significant as your own.

It’s a very weird thing being a photographer.

[The people who run things] are so successful in the way they do it now. They could buy me off with a couple of vintage prints, they could have you do an ad, or give you a ribbon... In capitalist countries they reward artists because we're ineffectual.

I wanted to change history and preserve humanity. But in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.

As a child I had been so afraid of so many things, but as soon as I held a camera in my hand, I began to expose myself to the very things that were foreign to me and that I had always feared.