“Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times-the pulse of today.”

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality.

I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.

Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism – real life – the now.

You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I’m the one to do it.

To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it.

I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I’ll be there until the last minute, fighting.

Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable.

It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.

I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.

I’m not a nice girl; I’m a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )

Actually, documentary pictures include every subject in the world – good, bad, indifferent. I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

What we need of equipment is this: let it possess as good a structure as the real-life content that surrounds us. We need more simplifications to free us for seeing.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That’s the only way they are going to find themselves. They can’t do it in their heads – they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film.

The thing we have to fear in this country, to my way of thinking, is the influence of the organized minorities, because somehow or other the great majority does not seem to organize.

Almost every cartoonist, when he’s sitting down to draw a funny face.

if you watch him closely, his mouth is gonna curl to the expression that he’s drawing.

The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.

The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.

Geometry alone is not enough to portray human desires, expressions, aspirations, joys. We need more.

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.

For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water.