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

If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me.

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.

Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.

To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.

My main interest was finding boyfriends. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in.

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