I meet people in my business who have this extraordinary ability to understand human nature in their work, but in real life, they don't seem to have the first clue.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

I'm not by nature a terribly intuitive person; I need to build a situation in which I will behave more intuitively, and that has really changed the life of my work - I found a way to trick myself into being intuitive.

It is the nature of the business that you work unsociable, unpredictable hours and can get called away at a moment's notice to somewhere on the other side of the world. This can put a strain on home and personal life.

We need balance. We need to balance our inner life with our outer life. Nature is always sitting there waiting to help us, but we have to do the work. Nature is probably the greatest teacher that we'll ever have... the earth and nature.

When we are caught up in the nature of our work and are asked to take on another job or position, rarely do we step back and ask ourselves, 'What do I really want to do? What is it at this point in my career and life that is important to me?'

When I work, a lot of times I have to lose weight, and I do that, but in my regular life I was not eating right, and I was not getting enough exercise. But by the nature of my diet and that lifestyle - boom! The end result was high blood sugars that reach the levels where it becomes Type 2 diabetes. I share that with a gajillion other people.

Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.

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