What I end up shooting is the situation. I shoot the composition and my subject is going to help the composition or not.

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

Everyone keeps asking you for pictures, and after a while you get tired of that. I always say, They are in the archives.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

I shoot a little bit, maybe two rolls, medium format, which is 20 pictures, and if it's not working, I change the position.

Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.

There certainly are people who are a pain to work with. I'd be crazy to name them. You can't be indiscreet in this business.

A photograph is just a little, teeny-weeny, small piece of life. I feel like I see so much more than what I can actually get.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

I didn't want to let women down. One of the stereotypes I see breaking is the idea of aging and older women not being beautiful.

It's a heavy weight, the camera. Now we have modern and lightweight, small plastic cameras, but in the '70s they were heavy metal.

There are still so many places on our planet that remain unexplored. I'd love to one day peel back the mystery and understand them.

When you are younger, the camera is like a friend and you can go places and feel like you're with someone, like you have a companion.

I'm pretty used to people not liking having their picture taken. I mean, if you do like to have your picture taken, I worry about you.

A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject. A piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that.

When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that's what I was doing, but it wasn't.

My body was so instrumental to how I took pictures: it was practically a dance. I used to use my legs a lot; now I'm a little more sedentary.

I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism.

I love having the photograph in my hand. I love looking at the photograph. I love looking at a box of photographs. I just love the still photograph.

I went to Yosemite as an homage to Ansel Adams. I could never be Ansel Adams, but to know that's there for us - there's so much for us in this country.

As much as I'm not a journalist, I use journalism. And when you photograph a relationship, it's quite wonderful to let something unfold in front of you.

The pictures of my family were designed to be on a family wall, they were supposed to be together. It was supposed to copy my mother's wall in her house.

One of the great things about being an older person is that I am very aware of the scope of the work and the historical sense of it. It's bigger than me.

When you are on assignment, film is the least expensive thing in a very practical sense. Your time, the person's time, turns out to be the most valuable thing.

I am impressed with what happens when someone stays in the same place and you took the same picture over and over and it would be different, every single frame.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.

Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.

What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.

I fell in love with the darkroom, and that was part of being a photographer at the time. The darkroom was unbelievably sexy. I would spend all night in the darkroom.

As soon as you put something to bed like the 'Women' book, you're never finished. There were portraits of people that I wanted to photograph - it's an endless subject.

All dancers are, by and large, a photographer's dream. They communicate with their bodies and they are trained to be completely responsive to a collaborative situation.

I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time.

As fantastic as it is to have 'Vogue' and 'Vanity Fair' as places to work, I don't often get to shoot the kind of things I like to photograph in the way I like to photograph.

I was scared to do anything in the studio because it felt so claustrophobic. I wanted to be somewhere where things could happen and the subject wasn't just looking back at you.

I'd like to think that the actions we take today will allow others in the future to discover the wonders of landscapes we helped protect but never had the chance to enjoy ourselves.

I’d like to think that the actions we take today will allow others in the future to discover the wonders of landscapes we helped protect but never had the chance to enjoy ourselves.

When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that's what I was doing, but it wasn't true. What became important was to have a point of view.

There is a myth that the portrait photographer is supposed to make the subject relax, and that's the real person. But I'm interested in whatever is going on. And I'm not that comfortable myself.

Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we're really talking about is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that's when you start taking pictures.

I was out there with the White House press squad, and after his helicopter took off, and the carpet rolled up...This wasn't a photograph that others were taking, but I continued to take pictures.

What I learned from Lennon was something that did stay with me my whole career, which is to be very straightforward. I actually love talking about taking pictures, and I think that helps everyone.

In this day and age of things moving so, so fast, we still long for things to stop, and we as a society love the still image. Every time there is some terrible or great moment, we remember the stills.

I was scared when I went to Conde Nast. I had heard horror stories about how they used you up and then spit you out and went on. But there was this great history of photography that had been done there.

I'm a huge, huge fan of photography. I have a small photography collection. As soon as I started to make some money, I bought my very first photograph: an Henri Cartier-Bresson. Then I bought a Robert Frank.

I went on tour with the Rolling Stones in 1972 for two or three cities. And in 1975, I was the tour photographer for the Rolling Stones. I hung onto my camera for dear life. Because it scared the hell out of me.

I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn't be an art teacher unless I became an artist first.

When I was younger, I did things with a camera I would not do by myself. I remember going down to the docks in San Francisco and asking a fisherman if he would take me out on his boat. I would never do that without a camera.

I realized I couldn't be a journalist because I like to take a side, to have an opinion and a point a view; I liked to step across the imaginary boundary of the objective view that the journalist is supposed to have and be involved.

I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.

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