As I have traveled and photographed, I have seen these qualities in abundance. I have seen them in places where I myself might have given up or quit because the challenge was so great. I see within them the unique and the universal. I am convinced that even in the most desperate of circumstances, people have the ability to know joy and to call upon their innermost selves and exhibit strengths they did not know they had. People can laugh, at others and at themselves.
People laugh with happiness, and people laugh at the impossibility of their situation.
My photographic journey has been a two-way street. I have been the beneficiary of generosity and moral uplift from what I considered to be the most unlikely of places. As I photographed, I learned the most not from teachers but from people living their lives as best they could in poverty and in plenitude. One of the most important lessons I learned was from a photographer at the tip of South America. The trip to Tierra del Fuego was the second for my friend Bob and me.