The class that I teach is called "The Life of a Photograph." It takes up the question, of the billion photographs that were taken today, how many will have a life, and why? So the new reality has made the question more pertinent, not less pertinent.

There are things that I teach, about building photographs, and that's why people come to my workshops. When people come to the workshops, they're consumed with seeking the subject, and I teach seeking the setting.

"You know you are seeing such a photograph if you say to yourself, "I could have taken that picture. I've seen such a scene before, but never like that." It is the kind of photography that relies for its strengths not on special equipment or effects but on the intensity of the photographer's seeing. It is the kind of photography in which the raw materials-light, space, and shape-are arranged in a meaningful and even universal way that gives grace to ordinary objects."

That statement [ Stephen Ambrose:'You, Sam, have the hardest job, which is, pretend like nothing has happened in the last 200 years.'] woke me up to the fact that the landscape that Lewis and Clark came across was greater than the Serengeti. And it's gone.

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.

This might seem off the track, but an interesting thing to me that others could talk about better than I, but one of the growth areas in photographic education has been the so-called slow photography.

For spiritual companions I have had the many artists who have relied on nature to help shape their imagination. And their most elaborate equipment was a deep reverence for the world through which they passed. Photographers share something with these artists. We seek only to see and to describe with our own voices, and, though we are seldom heard as soloists, we cannot photograph the world in any other way.