The danger is that you can wind up doing tourist pictures. I want to see it fresh and see the little bits of everyday life that a native might take for granted, but that are special to the place, while at the same time, not taking a picture that would be a tourist cliché.

A photograph has edges the world does not.

I have to be reminded, “’It’s your son’s birthday party. Bring a camera.’ And then, when I’m there, ‘Take a picture,’ because it doesn’t occur to me to use it as this memorializing thing.

I've been the head of the photography program at Bard College for over 30 years, and I take that as seriously as I do my photography. My time is devoted to that too.

I'm always interested in finding new aesthetic problems to deal with and challenge myself, even if the aesthetic problem is one of content.

With a painting, you're taking basic building blocks and making something that's more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it.

Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.