Teaching has never been far from my life. It's the most natural thing I do. Apparently, as I said, I cannot not do it.

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

Yes, there are billions more photographers, and billions more photographs every day, but who's building up a point of view? Who's photographing with intention, and whose body of work will sustain itself and survive?

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.

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

I will just say, appropriation is an intellectual idea until it happens to you. It's a philosophy, and it's got its own intellectual framework. Then there's what happens when it's your photograph. Then it's personal, and that's all I'll say.

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.