[The small camera] taught me energy and decisiveness and immediacy ... The large camera taught me reverence, patience, and meditation.

When you're on the street, and, as you're walking along, a woman turns the corner going away from you, and for an instant you have a glimpse of the side of her face, of the gesture of her shoulder, the shape of her body, and you are committed... You are in love for an instant, or your senses are rocked for an instant. That person then disappears and is lost to you forever.

You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.

I want to enjoy the languor of just living, recognizing, acknowledging, taking it in, sort of amplifying it in some way. [Photography] is a great medium for that. It happens in an instant, but it gives you hours or days of time to reflect on things. It’s a beautiful system, this game of photography, to see in an instant and go back and think about later on. It’s pure philosophy. And poetry.

Then I thought, Whoa. If there are no photographs, then there is no history. I'm going to get in there. I'm going to make these pictures. We need a record.

I photographed the entire thing in color because to photograph it in black and white would be to keep it as a tragedy. Because there is a tragic element to photographing, in this case not war, but the collapse. It was just destruction.

It comes down to risk, again and again. If you risk coming out, if you risk making pictures that aren’t good, you might discover something in a photograph that is the key. The very doorway to your own interest.