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I collect old Coon Chicken Inn memorabilia. I collect black memorabilia, like old minstrel posters. It was a real place. There was one in Seattle, one in Portland, and one in Salt Lake City. They started in 1925, and then they went out of business around 1958.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In the nonprofit world, the right picture is worth tens of thousands of dollars. I use PhotoPad to sync our Samasource Flickr account to my iPad and slip it out of my purse at cocktail parties to tell our story.

My mom and I don't have a lot of photos of my early years.

I wanted to make pictures where you would not know who took them. I also bring the present into the past.

In a way, my father was lucky. He had a hunch that his vision of the National Gallery would interest other collectors and persuade them to come in with him, and that hunch proved to be right.

My father was a painter, so I was encouraged to take a sketchbook everywhere. Cameras are perishable, but I still have tonnes of sketchbooks from all the trips I've ever been on. It gets you by when you don't know what to give people as a gift; drawings are good souvenirs.

30 years and 55 pictures - not more than five that were any good, or any good for me.

My father loved antique shops and shows, and quite a bit of my childhood involved outings to dim, dusty places packed with cast-off treasures.

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.

I collect art. I just recently bought two gorgeous photographs of Marilyn Monroe by international photographer Eve Arnold and I know it sounds horrible but when she dies all her pictures are going to be worth triple. But I won't tell you how much I got them for - let's just say it was a lot.