Searching the fringes of culture with a camera as a ticket into drag show dressing rooms, strip clubs, tattoo parlors, homeless shelters, and the homes of countless men and women dying from AIDS, led me on a journey through some of the taboo haunts of the south and, in some ways, into its heart.

The people I met there helped me form a more empathetic view of those who were left on the outside of mainstream society. Those people your mother warned you about turned out to be kind and generous, their lifestyles belied by friendships and needs, the same as all of us.

Curiosity is a powerful motivator for documentary photography and my own was at its zenith in the 1980s when youth and exuberance trumped caution and the camera became an excuse without which I would have seemed just another voyeur.