'Tough' meant it was an uncompromising image, something that came from your gut, out of instinct, raw, of the moment, something that couldn't be described in any other way. So it was tough. Tough to like, tough to see, tough to make, tough to understand. The tougher they were the more beautiful they became.

I find it strangely beautiful that the camera with its inherent clarity of object and detail can produce images that in spite of themselves offer possibilities to be more than they are a photograph of nothing very important at all, nothing but an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographer’s experience.

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.

We all experience it. Those moments when we gasp and say, Oh, look at that. Maybe it's nothing more than the way a shadow glides across a face, but in that split second, when you realize something truly remarkable is happening and disappearing right in front of you, if you can pass a camera before your eye, you'll tear a piece of time out of the whole, and in a breath, rescue it and give it new meaning.

I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it's got lots of accounting going on in it-stones and buildings and trees and air - but that's not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.

Photography is about being exquisitely present.

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