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.

I remember growing up and hearing the word "ugly" a lot. "I'm ugly." "She ugly." "He ugly." I hated it then, and I hate it now. I go past physical beauty; I tell people they have a beautiful spirit and that is something different.

I'm shooting a gangbanger, but as a dignified man. That's pretty much what war photography did: seeing images of soldiers in a dignified way. They might have been killers in Vietnam, but I'm seeing another side of them, and looking at images of the the American soldiers, also the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong - I never saw an enemy.

I think that photography has allowed me to have a voice. I used to stutter, and once I overcame that struggle, it felt good to tell people they were beautiful and special.

Photography is humbling, it really is, and it really allows for me to atone for some of the missteps I've made throughout the course of my life.

My camera is my compass; it's guided me to so many different places.

I think what it was with the war photography was the concerned eye, the desire to document these situations to show the world the horrors of war. It inspired me to document prostitution; inspired me to document homelessness in America. We are the richest country in the world, yet we have people suffering, so it helped me to look at things in that manner.