I’m past photographing to see what things look like photographed.

Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb—an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt.

It's always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary...it never occurred to me to leave home to make art.

It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles.

Every image is in some way a “portrait,” not in the way that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that it pulls and draws (this is the semantic and etymological sense of the word), in that it extracts something, an intimacy, a force.

If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic, it's sort of a magpie aesthetic - I just go and pick up whatever is around. If you think about it, the children were there, so I took pictures of my children. It's not that I'm interested in children that much or photographing them - it's just that they were there.

I have nothing but respect for people who travel the world to make art and put exotic Indians in front of linen backdrops, but it's always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary.