I lived and grew up in the black and white period of photojournalism.
And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.
The photographers I worked alongside loved the news cycle and the hustle and getting that front page of the newspaper. But I wanted to be out in the field in conflict areas, documenting real life rather than political theater.
I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.
I love Robert Capa.
If I wasn't a comic or TV star, I really wanted to be a photojournalist. That was my other dream job.
I work on stories rather than individual pictures.
Photographers do more assignments than reporters do, so they know their communities better.
I've been a documentary photographer for much longer than I have been a filmmaker.
Bloggers and other flavors of lone wolf are publishing heart-wrenching photo-essays from the front line of the recovery effort. Newspapers and TV networks? They're writing about the temperature of the water in some part (they don't specify which) of some damaged reactor, illustrating it with video screen grabs of machinery they don't understand enough to explain.
I realise that I had the best of serious picture journalism. There was an innocence in our approach, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when we naively believed that by holding a mirror up to the world we could help - no matter how little - to make people aware of the human condition.
I do love acting. But to work as a photojournalist would have been extraordinary.
I've rarely seen portrayals of photojournalists that seem accurate.
