“Some photographers take reality and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.”

The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.

As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence.

I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.

Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression.

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite.

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

The term accessories has come to include a host of photographic gadgets of questionable value.

I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.

I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Happy would it be for women, if they were only flattered by the men who loved them; I mean, who love the individual, not the sex.

Treat yourself like you would someone you’re responsible for helping.

Most of us must learn to love people and use things rather than loving things and using people.

I tried to love you less. I couldn’t.

I love you, with a touch of tragedy and quite madly.

The life of the dead is placed on the memories of the living. The love you gave in life keeps people alive beyond their time. Anyone who was given love will always live on in another’s heart.

I would have to have a bit of heroism and get out of myself. But I love myself so much!

For not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent’s love.