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

Sometimes we are just divided, but we still, for the most part, we have similar hopes and dreams.

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.

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

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

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.

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.