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.

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

I was known as a 35-mm photographer with a view-camera mentality.

As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.

In the last workshop I taught, a woman flew in from Thailand. She's a medical doctor in Bangkok. I asked her in her one-on-one session where she wanted photography to be in her life.Did she want a second career? Was it about earning money? Or was it art? And she said "None of those. I want photography to be serious in my life." It would be like someone wanting music, like piano playing, to be a richer, deeper, and maybe even harder experience.

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 giving a lecture and I said, that's enough about The Photographic Life, meaning my biography, now let's talk about the life of a photograph. And in that one instant I got the title for a potential next book.