I believe that whatever I photograph is something that I connect with, without thinking about it. I just know it when I see it.

I grew up in Ridgefield, New Jersey, home to Man Ray’s artist colony. Art was in the air. When I was four, I studied with one of its painters.

From earliest childhood nothing made me happier than drawing and coloring. My mother did watercolors and showed me how.

My father, an avid amateur photographer, inspired me. When I was 14, he gave me my first camera, a 35 mm. Kodak. I have taken photographs ever since.

After college I joined TIME-LIFE. As staff we were all immersed in the great LIFE photographers’ work, such as that of Margaret Bourke-White, Yousuf Karsh, Alfred Eisenstadt, W. Eugene Smith, Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks and a host of others.

For me my inspiration may be a sudden Cartier-Bresson “decisive moment,” or it may be a particular theme, such as my portfolio, “Children: Light and Dark.”

—Melissa Wanamaker