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I think only now am I at the age where I've forgiven the past enough to say, 'You know what? Slavery was there. Let's talk about it in ways that will help us face tomorrow.

Slavery is something that is all too often swept under the carpet.

You got to remember that slavery's very complex. It has a lot of levels to it.

Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.

I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.

If you feel like the beginning of your history is rooted in slavery, that really, I think, messes with your sense of self, your self-esteem, and your self-worth.

Oddly, I'd been to most of the locations where I started photographing slavery many times before. I even considered some of them homes-away-from-home. But there can be dark corners in familiar places.

We must continue to judge of slavery by what it is, and not by what you tell us it will, or may be.

In those days, slavery was not looked upon, even in Quaker Philadelphia, with the shudder and abhorrence one feels towards it now.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.