“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.”

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

The best way to go into an unknown territory is to go in ignorant, ignorant as possible, with your mind wide open, as wide open as possible and not having to meet anyone else’s requirement but your own.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can’t see watches you.

No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander.

To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention.

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight… The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

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

If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions.

Sometimes you need to press pause to let everything sink in.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

I’m from Samoan heritage, and with the rugby in our blood and everything,

I see them in my audience all the time, with the fur coat, a woman whose hand is always out front, or the two fingers are on the cheek to show her diamond. I don’t have anything against that.

I think that the important changes have already happened, changes in consciousness. It’s mostly a matter of everything else catching up to that.

Orson Welles was one of these people who was defying everything the doctors told him he wasn’t supposed to be doing. He was really enjoying himself when he was eating what he wanted to eat.

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.