I am a storyteller. I've never been interested in just taking the single image and moving on. I always like to stay with the people I'm photographing for long periods of time.

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.

At the end of the day, what I show is real life. I tell the truth. And the truth can be shocking.

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 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. Over the years, the work has changed for me. I know that I have wanted to repeat myself, but I can't. I've been lost a lot of times, but then I'd just get an idea and photograph it. Once I'd started, I'd know exactly what would go down and how it would end. So I just quit doing it, because it loses all interest for me when you know what's going to happen.

If I want something I do everything to get it.

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.