When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths 'told slant,' just as Emily Dickinson commanded.

Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs.

There are a number of things that set Southern artists apart from anyone else. Their obsession with place and their obsession with family.

The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best.

The earth doesn’t care where death occurs. ...It’s the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death’s memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.

You can tell a good ruined lens, right from the get-go.... That’s the kind of lens I'm looking for.

Unless you photograph what you love, you're not going to make good art.