I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.

The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.

Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.

The portrait of a person is one of the most difficult things to do. It means you must almost bring the presence of that person photographed to other people in such a way that they don't have to know that person personally, but that they are still confronted with a human being that they won't forget. That's a portrait.

I think of myself as an explorer who has spent his life on a long voyage of discovery.

It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

All good art is abstract in its structure.