The experience of life that you and I have is pretty much a jigsaw puzzle in the box: Day-to-day experiences of disconnected pieces that don't seem to justify the efforts we make each day.

I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated. But there was something about these pictures. They were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious.

I began making pictures because I wanted to record what supports hope: the untranslatable mystery and beauty of the world. Along the way, however, the camera also caught evidence against hope, and I eventually concluded that this, too, belonged in pictures if they were to be truthful and thus useful.

No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.

When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.

You can't talk about life without talking about politics. You have to have both. If you're just a political person, you're going to burn out. If you, as an artist, are just focused inward, you're going to eventually be irrelevant.

My first show at MoMA in New York was pictures of new developments along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. They were housing developments that were brutal in many ways, that cared almost not a thing for the human beings inside. They were just designed to make money.

Television probably has become the most evocative, widely observed signpost we have.