So Andy came over, and he said, “I could paint a room.” I had an extra bathroom, and the next day he came to paint it. When I got home at about 6:00, he had painted a tree going up the wall, and there he was putting leaves on the tree. He had a rubber stamp of leaves. He had another stamp of cherries, and he put cherries on the tree. And he had a butterfly stamp and put butterflies around the tree, and he swabbed them with orange or yellow or red paint, in his style of not really painting but just giving it a splash. He painted two calico cats on the wall, and one on the toilet seat. A couple of years later we left the building, and eventually it burned down. Later it occurred to me that I should have kept the toilet seat!

I suppose most of these photographs have stories attached to them. How did you decide which ones to include?

As a photojournalist you accumulate a lot of stuff, and in going through something like 12,000 photographs over about three months, I found this picture [Bluegrass]. Nobody’s seen it before. It’s from a bluegrass festival in Virginia, and it’s an extraordinary picture. Everything works. Every line leads back into the picture. Everything: the hat, and the dog, and even the tape recorder. This is what I try to get, but you don’t always get it.

Which one is your favorite?

Every photographer should have projects. Sometimes these projects might take five years, sometimes three days. Without magazine assignments it’s especially important to have something that you’re doing. Here [in Sao Paolo, Brazil, Homemade Car] I was working on color shots of the biggest cities in the world. I was in Brazil in a slum area, and this little boy had been following me for 20 minutes. I saw this car pieced together from the junkyard, and I did something that I don’t remember ever doing before. I took this position against the car, and I gestured for him to do the same thing. And he did it, much nicer than me.