Back in 1978, when I first left for India- really left with that young man's, door-slamming sense of forever- I'd already been all over the world. But this time was different. This time I had slung over my shoulder the camera that I was determined would somehow pay for a serious case of wanderlust-wanderlust as the ancient traders had it, hauling the teas, dyes and spices that still stain the roads and permeate the air of the most colourful part of the world.

Years later, colour still takes me South-by-southeast to Asia- colour and life and light. The Buddha, Shiva-, Allah-Laden light of 1,000-year-old temples, the rain-like light of Burma and Cambodia, and the rocket-pulverized dust of Afghanistan where tribal wars continue to rage. Wherever you go in that part of that world, there is the riot of life carried out in the streets and bazaars. And, like the overpowering weather, there is religion that controls life with a force the west hasn't known since the Renaissance.

It is this unbroken continuity with the past and ancient beliefs that still takes me back to Asia, and it's a quality unique in the world. In India in particular, where millions have no home but the streets, virtually every life event is carried out in public: prayer, eating, sleeping, nursing, crude dentistry, even bodily functions. In the secular West, where nothing is sacred, everything seems hidden: yet in Asia, where nothing is hidden, everything sacred.

Above all, I feed on the colours of Asia: deep henna, hammered gold, curry and saffron, rich black lacquer and painted-over rot. As I reflect back on it, I see it was the vibrant colour of Asia that taught me to see and write in light. Go down that alley. Follow that child. Find the brightness of life in the dusty, never-painted drab of Calcutta. Wait for the light at its deepest and most intense like a farmer's rain. It is amazing how, in the camera's third eye, Asia's dust spins such golden clarities and abundance, such undersea depths.

Still, colour alone, or structure for structure's sake, are not for me what finally make a good picture. What makes for a powerful image-much like Asia itself-is the confluence of all these elements within the rude stream of life. It is colour and structure all subordinated into the sacred right then of the only-offered-once. More than twenty years later, I still keep shooting in South and Southeast Asia, because the place-like the light and the belief that powers life-is inexhaustible.