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

A very big part of the life of a photograph is the afterlife.

I did it once, and National Geographic recruited me. I did it primarily out of curiosity. A lot of legendary photographers had worked on that campaign. Ernst Haas had done the early photography, and I knew him. There's a lore in photography about that campaign, and I was curious.

I had a book come out several years ago, when there were no blogs. This is a mark to me about how the environment has changed.

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.

I'm very involved in photographing America now, so I don't think of faraway places, as I did when I was young.

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.