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.

My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

And that desire-the strong desire to take pictures-is important. It borders on a need, based on a habit: the habit of seeing. Whether working or not, photographers are looking, seeing, and thinking about what they see, a habit that is both a pleasure and a problem, for we seldom capture in a single photograph the full expression of what we see and feel. It is the hope that we might express ourselves fully-and the evidence that other photographers have done so-that keep us taking pictures.

Teaching has never been far from my life. It's the most natural thing I do. Apparently, as I said, I cannot not do it.

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.

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

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