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

Richard Prince's most famous photograph was made by me.

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

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 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.

Editorial photography has to be energetic and visually competitive.

My first priority when taking pictures is to achieve clarity. A good documentary photograph transmits the information of the situation with the utmost fidelity; achieving it means understanding the nuances of lighting and composition, and also remembering to keep the lenses clean and the cameras steady.