If you're going to photograph skateboarders you can't run after them, you've got to learn how to skate. So at about 50 years old I learned how to skate, and skate fast enough to keep up with them and hold my camera.

I learned how to skate, I couldn't do the tricks, but I could certainly skate fast enough. I could keep up with anybody and I could bomb hills and I could hide behind my camera.

I always felt that when I was photographing, I had a psychic need to see this, to photograph this. And I think if somebody else had been doing this work, and if I could have seen these pictures anywhere at all, then there would have been no need to make them.

I was over self-medicating back when I was a kid and didn't know it.

My greatest lesson in composition was looking at paintings.

I tell people to frame the picture. Make the greatest, most perfect composition you can . . . and then take a step forward. It skews it a bit and makes it more interesting.

I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn’t planned; it was realism.