I began after college, about 1972. I began to teach myself photography. I went to work for a local newspaper for four years as a kind of basic training.
My uncle was a photographer for 'The Irish Times.'
I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.
[Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)
In my 20s, when I was a photojournalist in Beijing. I joined an underground art group and put on clandestine exhibitions of my paintings.
If I wasn't a comic or TV star, I really wanted to be a photojournalist.
I realize that I had the best of serious picture journalism.
A number of years ago, I found a book of photography by Weegee; he was a crime photographer in the 1930s in New York. He was the first person to put a police scanner in a car and drive around.
The possibility to mobilize the international community to act on human suffering is what drives me every day as a photojournalist.
I always take hundreds and hundreds of pictures. I used to work for 'National Geographic,' and they gave us a lot of film.
I started photographing people on the street during World War II. I used a little box Brownie. Nothing too expensive.
