A photograph has edges the world does not.

I do what feels natural, but I can't say I haven't thought about it.

As not a native, I have the advantage of not seeing scenes habitually. I can see things fresh.

The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.

There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically... I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.

I know that people think of my work from the '70s as American, but I've been going to other places for a long time.

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus.