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

I have to say, taking photographs is such an instantaneous act. The recognition and the acting on the recognition, depending on your equipment, is close to instantaneous.

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

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

They [photographs] teach you about your own unraveling past, or about the immediacy of yesterday. They show you what you look at. If you take a photograph, you've been responsive to something, and you looked hard at it. Hard for a thousandth of a second, hard for ten minutes. But hard, nonetheless. And it's the quality of that bite that teaches you how connected you were to that thing, and where you stood in relation to it, then and now.

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.