Quote

Having worked with so many of the geniuses, I'd learned so much. It's the best sort of photography school, to work with people like Penn or Avedon or Meisel.

There have been so many photographers and editors who mentored me over the years. At the very beginning, the person who taught me the most was Arthur Elgort. I always loved working with him. We traveled a lot together.

I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.

Photography has always been a passion of mine, but I began to study light field photography when I was in the Ph.D. program at Stanford University.

I went to university in Colorado and studied art history. I did some photography classes there, although it felt really pretentious.

When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days.

Philip Greenspun had a huge impact on me. He was the first person I knew of that embraced online communities, created a real business around open source, gave back to the community through education, and inspired me to explore photography.

When I graduated, I felt a little burned out on taking pictures after so many years of churning out so many for classes.

I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.