Hans-Peter van Velthoven

So I put on my lens, I put in a certain film, and I look through my lens and I still remember the moment I looked through the lens and said, "This is my life. This is what I want to do; this is it."

"Til the end of the world" was playing, Bono was walking on the stage, and suddenly he made a move to me. . . . He became closer and closer and suddenly he pulled me—and I'm a big guy and he's short—up stage. Suddenly in front of 40,000 people, I was there, like, what the hell.

It was me they wanted to work with, not the camera, not the techniques, not the rational part. No, the emotional part.

I'm never like, "You have to know me," no, it's your work that has to do the language to talk, not you as a person.

Nowadays you buy a digital camera and you say, "Oh, I'm a photographer." That's not the way it works. The way it works is becoming a photographer, it's your own skills, not the camera, because everybody can learn the manual.