At the end of the day, what I show is real life. I tell the truth. And the truth can be shocking.

I've always been interested in people that you wouldn't see otherwise. If you look back at my books, photographs, and films-and since I'm doing this retrospective I've been forced to look back-the work is always about a small group of people who are somewhat isolated, and who you would never see if I didn't film or photograph them.

I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn’t planned; it was realism.

If I want something I do everything to get it.

I tell people to frame the picture. Make the greatest, most perfect composition you can . . . and then take a step forward. It skews it a bit and makes it more interesting.

For me there are no rules. I think I learned that from artists-from painters and sculptors. It took photography a while to catch up to them.

My favorite color is green.

My greatest lesson in composition was looking at paintings.

I am a storyteller. I've never been interested in just taking the single image and moving on. I always like to stay with the people I'm photographing for long periods of time.

I always felt that when I was photographing, I had a psychic need to see this, to photograph this. And I think if somebody else had been doing this work, and if I could have seen these pictures anywhere at all, then there would have been no need to make them.