“Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If not, the machine can destroy us.”

Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.

You go into a room and you know where you’re welcome; you know where you’re unwelcome.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

The words that come direct from the people are the greatest.If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.

I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.

To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

The people who are garrulous and wear their heart on their sleeve and tell you everything, that’s one kind of person, but the fellow who’s hiding behind a tree and hoping you don’t see him is the fellow that you’d better find out why.

Being disabled gave me an immense advantage. People are kinder to you. It puts you on a different level than if you go into a situation whole and secure.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don’t know is how to photograph affluence – whose other face is poverty.