Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.

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.

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.

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

What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information.

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.

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