I've been taking pictures since I was probably 16. I'm 54, and I can't believe how excited I am.

Something about photography is tied to a very specific relationship with the material world. It doesn't have to be, but the way I practice it, it is. So there's an act of observation, but it's not an act of objective recording. It's about framing something and seeing it and understanding that it's relational.

I grew up in Harlem, but I moved to the Lower East Side when I was a teenager and it was ... I feel like when I try to describe it, it doesn't sound believable. It just sounds like you're lying. And I see it on the faces of my younger friends.

I'd grown up poor; I had no idea what it was like to be comfortable.

There's a desire for me in the work, even when I'm looking at the past, to be looking from the present. It's to be here now. It's looking in the present tense.

I don't quite understand how a generation and a half after the Second World War we've gotten where we are now.

I'm always learning. I can't imagine doing anything else.