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.

That statement [ Stephen Ambrose:'You, Sam, have the hardest job, which is, pretend like nothing has happened in the last 200 years.'] woke me up to the fact that the landscape that Lewis and Clark came across was greater than the Serengeti. And it's gone.

Editorial photography has to be energetic and visually competitive.

Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.

The neatest part of this book I'm working on - to me - are the pictures that show the process... Because photographers... think things through and... it isn't luck, and it isn't random and it isn't accidental. It isn't.

My least favorite photographer to have would be myself. Someone who wanted a career at National Geographic. Because it's almost mathematically impossible to achieve that.

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.