I could be standing in the supermarket, and there is a person standing down the aisle, who is reading the back of a cornflakes box but everything about them is going It's me! I'm the one you want! I am the necessary subject. This is it!

You pick up a camera because something has been revealed to you in the landscape or in the human-scape. And you have no choice because it's a gift. And it's like, oh right, I better start doing this!

The world is a colony of the US. The twentieth century was the US's century.

In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph.

It just struck me that one of the things about photography that made it such a compelling medium to deal with is that it is perhaps the most contradictory of mediums.

What happens with experiences that really move us deeply, that really effect us? They make the world new again. What it does is it heightens our sense of mortality.

As a boy I was obsessed with Egypt and Egyptology. I'm convinced it's not that uncommon. A lot of 10 or 12 year old boys become obsessed with Egypt. It's a bit like young girls and horses.

On practical level I can't pick up the camera until I think I know what I want. I don't wander around. It's almost impossible for me to pick up a camera... it's really hard.

When you shoot on film, you don't know whether you've got it or not until you get the film processed, and so it changes the relationship we have with the subject whether it's a landscape or a person in a so-called controlled environment in a chair in a studio in front of you.

You spend your whole life trapped inside your body. Everything you know about the world comes to you through your body.

Most of life is grey, with a little tiny bit of black and white.

There's something about the processional nature of the architecture, of the rooms connecting rooms. It's just breathtaking.

When you go to a great concert something that happens is there is a deep sense of communality and connectedness one to another - as though we are all looking to eachother and saying yeah, we get it, we're all on one page.