Increasingly, it's people not interested in National Geographic.

Yes, there are billions more photographers, and billions more photographs every day, but who's building up a point of view? Who's photographing with intention, and whose body of work will sustain itself and survive?

My connection to Santa Fe is very closely, and continuously a connection with Reid. I believe in him and his philosophy of photographic education.

My parents, grandmother and brother were teachers. My mother taught Latin and French and was the school librarian. My father taught geography and a popular class called Family Living, the precursor to Sociology, which he eventually taught. My grandmother was a beloved one-room school teacher at Knob School, near Sonora in Larue County, Ky.

What I'm interested in is modern American history. I'm taken with the changes that have occurred in America in my lifetime.

Typically I see it with photographers who go to a place like India or Nepal, and everything's so colorful and exotic and they think, therefore, a picture's been taken.

I wanted life to be episodic. I wanted to be a magazine photographer and I was willing to do what it took to become that.