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

It actually has transcended my career at the Geographic, so that when my career there ended, I had momentum as a teacher, and a belief in photographic education at the workshop level.

For sheer majestic geography and sublime scale, nothing beats Alaska and the Yukon. For culture, Japan. And for all-around affection, Australia.

I have this awareness that the more dynamic the situation is, the more on guard I need to be that the dynamic isn't controlling the situation. I found that myself in the Galapagos. For the first time in my life I was around very exotic animals, colorful, beautiful, and immediately present, all around. Birds, turtles, iguanas, seals. I was being seduced by their exoticism, I was taking pictures.The pictures weren't well lit, there was no moment in play, there was no depth to the pictures. I was just gawking with my camera at something I'd never seen before.

My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.

The reason I don't want to say anything about it is it has a strange power to take over the conversation. Just like it's doing with us. I was asked to participate in a documentary about Richard Prince, and be the voice of someone who was appropriated, and I declined. The reason I did is I don't want it to be the subject of the discussion of my work.

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.