None of the editors I've worked with have ever asked me to pull my punches. They've never asked me to give them anything other than my own interpretation of events.

I don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality. It's only reality as we experience it.

If Im feeling outraged, grief, disbelief, frustration, sympathy, that gets channeled through me and into my pictures and hopefully transmitted to the viewer.

The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians ... have not been able to put an end to war. Why place that demand on photography?

I began after college, about 1972. I began to teach myself photography. I went to work for a local newspaper for four years as a kind of basic training.

The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I am benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It's something I have to reckon with every day because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other; and to that extent, I can accept myself.

Photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.