I love the history of photography and one process has always replaced another. However, very, very few have disappeared.

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.

Making these photographs has often seemed to me like a kind of dance. Often I have danced badly and the world has fallen apart at my feet. But sometimes the dance has gone well and my subject and I have moved together as if with shared purpose.

How do you find a way to say what an extraordinary experience it is to be alive in this world? That is the kind of subject matter I try to work with.

I want to be made better personally. That is the gig.

I think the equipment you use has a real, visible influence on the character of your photography. You're going to work differently, and make different kinds of pictures, if you have to set up a view camera on a tripod than if you're Lee Friedlander with handheld 35 mm rangefinder. But fundamentally, vision is not about which camera or how many megapixels you have, it's about what you find important. It's all about ideas.