The reason I don't want to say anything about it is it has a strange power to take over the conversation. Just like it's doing with us. I was asked to participate in a documentary about Richard Prince, and be the voice of someone who was appropriated, and I declined. The reason I did is I don't want it to be the subject of the discussion of my work.

That's who comes to my workshops. I jokingly tell my students that the class could be called "Your photographs: Better."

Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

Though Geographic didn't publish that photo in the story that it was done for, "The Life of Charlie Russell," a cowboy artist in Montana. But later, maybe a year and a half ago, they named it one of the 50 greatest pictures ever made at National Geographic.

There are a lot of ways to talk about the life of a photograph. You can talk about the afterlife of a photograph, and in the end I talk about that, with the Richard Prince picture. But mainly, what I dedicated the book to being about was how photographs begin their life, and where they begin it. And they begin it with the photographer's imagination and instinct and experience.

We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.

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