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'Humans of New York' did not result from a flash on inspiration. It grew from five years of experimenting, tinkering, and messing up.

I struck upon this kind of crazy idea that I was going to go to New York and stop 10,000 people on the streets and take their portrait and create kind of a photographic census of the city.

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.

'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.

Ultimately we need to recognize that while humans continue to build urban landscapes, we share these spaces with others species.

I love how New York as an idea is less a paradigm of manifest destiny and more a romance for the social orphans of the world. We live here to be among the towers and the crowds.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn't changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament.

Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

When I meet somebody in the street who knows about 'Humans of New York,' a lot of times they might have a scripted answer, and that scripted answer is the first thing to come out of their mouth.