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.

I'm very involved in photographing America now, so I don't think of faraway places, as I did when I was young.

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.

I was asked by a student what my most significant accomplishment was at National Geographic, after thirty years, and I said that my career came to an appropriate close, and I still loved photography. Not everybody who spends their career at anything ends up fascinated and involved with it.

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.

The longer we lived with it the more we wanted something less about process and more about life.

...just like some people's instinct to photograph is triggered by vacation... assignments might be that to me and that's why I've built my life around assignments. That was the way to live the photographic life.