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

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.

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

I would like to go to Antarctica. That's about all.

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.

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.

My parents, grandmother and brother were teachers. My mother taught Latin and French and was the school librarian. My father taught geography and a popular class called Family Living, the precursor to Sociology, which he eventually taught. My grandmother was a beloved one-room school teacher at Knob School, near Sonora in Larue County, Ky.