Life rarely presents fully finished photographs. An image evolves, often from a single strand of visual interest - a distant horizon, a moment of light, a held expression.

My father taught me photography. It was his hobby, and we had a small darkroom in the fruit cellar of our basement. It was the kind of makeshift darkroom that was only dark at night.

Above all, it's hard learning to live with vivid mental images of scenes I cared for and failed to photograph. It is the edgy existence within me of these unmade images that is the only assurance that the best photographs are yet to be made.

There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing.

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.

There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.

I was a consultant for Kodak back in the late 80's. There were engineers there who told me that in the future, most photographs would be taken on telephones. They weren't able to do anything with that. They were engineers, not management.