“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.”

Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.

Photography helps people to see.

The photographer creates, evolves a better, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.

I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!

Suppose we took a thousand negatives… combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture.

The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will, but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in.

To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, more selective, more acute eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.

The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens’ vision are esthetically often a virtue.

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever.

I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

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.

If you don’t say what you’re thinking, you end up lying when you really need to speak up.

It doesn’t take much to be a successful artist-all you need to do is dedicate your entire life to it.

You don’t need planning permission to build castles in the sky

I prefer that for my own satisfaction over radio, there’s no audience. TV, there’s no audience. I need the response of the audience, even if it’s a silent response.

When the desire ain’t on me I don’t need help. When it is on me I don’t want any. See? Like the old fellah that never mended his roof. Said on a wet day he couldn’t do it and on a dry day it was as good as anybody’s.

Far too often, children with developmental disorders are diagnosed solely on the basis of their observable behavior

There are images I need to complete my own reality.

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.