The unusual wins out over the usual.

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

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

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

There are things that I teach, about building photographs, and that's why people come to my workshops. When people come to the workshops, they're consumed with seeking the subject, and I teach seeking the setting.

It's more difficult now, to be a Geographic photographer, than it was when I came along. And it wasn't easy at that time.

...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.