I do believe in angels and I believe that a lot of these people I'm supposed to meet. The photograph serves as evidence; it causes me to reflect on when I met this person.

The photograph is to a great degree evidence of the conversation I had with the person. It's a part of my visual diary.

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 read a recent statistic that eighty-seven percent of women are dissatisfied with themselves, and over forty-seven percent of men. My work is visu-medicine to heal people and see beauty within people.

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

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.

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.