The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don't know, or already know and should take seriously.

It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we're quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that's useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can't know exactly what it is we are doing.

I was going round the world searching for an interesting place, when I realized that the place that I was in was already interesting.

Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.

Of course, this is one of the really important things about art, that you can make more than you can understand at the moment the thing is being made. But the gap between what we recognize inside ourselves - our feelings- and our ability to trust ourselves and to trust exposing ourselves to those ideas, can be great.

The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don't know, or already know and should take seriously.

I made 10 times as many images as the other students," he says of the early years. "I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can't afford to waste time: take it seriously.