In 1965, I was in Trabzon in eastern Turkey on a Fulbright scholarship. I would get up every morning and walk around the streets and look for photographs.
I don't like to photograph children as children. I like to see them as adults, as who they really are. I'm always looking for the side of who they might become.
I've always been fascinated by twins. In my forty years of photographing, whenever there was an opportunity, I would take a picture of twins. I found the notion that two people could appear to look exactly alike very compelling.
Looking at my own prom photograph reminds me of how significant that moment was - and how fleeting life is.
I saw that my camera gave me a sense of connection with others that I never had before. It allowed me to enter lives, satisfying a curiosity that was always there but that was never explored before.
I realized all of the possibilities that could exist for me with my camera: all of the images that I could capture, all of the lives I could enter, all of the people I could meet and how much I could learn from them.
I'm most interested in finding the strangeness and irony in reality. That's my forte.
If I'm in an unusual or extreme social environment, I always want to know what it's like to grow up there and experience it as normal, everyday life. And I want to know what sort of adults these children are going to turn into.
I knew from the first moment I picked up a camera, on my first school assignment, what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was going to find a way to travel the world and tell the stories of the people I met through photographs.
During prom season, I travel around the country with a 20-by-24 camera - which is logistically complicated - and photograph proms. My husband made a film of it.
Every photograph is the photographer's opinion about something. It's how they feel about something: what they think is horrible, tragic, funny.
I don't relax. I can't take vacations. I'm obsessive-compulsive, and I worry with every project that I'm going to fail. When it starts to go well, and I sense that something beautiful and important and meaningful is being created, it's a fantastic feeling, and I find it very hard to stop.
I have an incredible relationship with dogs. I'm kind of a dog-whisperer.
I always think, 'What does this picture mean? What's the best place to put my camera? Do I have anything extra in the picture, things in the background that will distract? Am I in the basic position that will give the essential things for this picture but not too much?'
I don't see how a woman in documentary photography could have children. I think it's a very difficult thing to do to raise a family, and I have enormous respect for people who do it. I'd hate to do something like that and not be good at it.
I love to photograph people in their own environment. It offers clues to what's important in their lives.
I'm a street photographer, but I'm interested in any ironic, whimsical images, and there's something very romantic about a circus.
