I've also never had favorite pictures. Or subjects. I have this discipline of treating everything equally-I used to say "democratically."

I quite frequently don't look through the camera, which is very close to being blind.

Photography just gets us out of the house.

It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.

I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.

Unfortunately they're practically all dead. And many were my closest associates: friends, co-directors, whatever you want to say - my partners in crime.

A lot of my friends were mostly working in black-and-white-people like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and others. We would exchange prints with each other, and they were always very supportive of what I was doing. What each of us was doing photographically was entirely different, but we were basically coming from the same place, sort of like a club.