What I strive to do through my work, is to teach compassion. You need to have a lot of it, in this day and time, and it's lacking.

For me, the stars are the invisible people on the street that people don't really get a chance to know.

I wanted to go amongst gangbangers, to understand this war they were fighting amongst each other. I wanted to document it, [also] to show the human side of it.

There was a time in my life that I may not have been that nice, and now I'm in a position to contribute to the education of young people, and teach them to be compassionate, be more loving, more caring, to not use profanity, to not pollute the environment - these are things that I address in my photography. I

When you look at my photos, just look into the eyes of my subjects. The eyes say so much.

Philip Jones Griffith documented the Vietnam War, and through his images that were published in Time Life Magazine, it showed me the horrors of war and at that time, I wanted to be a war photographer, based off his work.

For the most part, as a society, we are not happy with ourselves.