“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 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.

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.

Does not the very word ‘creative’ mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act – rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life – not death.

What to me is anathema – a corpse-like, outmoded hangover – is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. … Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?

The scent goes right to your stomach.

Before I go on stage, I pretend that everyone loves me.

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.

So if everything goes off great, then it being a triple threat match will make it even more exciting instead of a singles match.

If you don’t find a way to break the chain and change in some way, then you wind up, as the rhyme goes: a murder of one, for sorrow.

the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. … At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.

As goes love so goes life.

Indian weddings are elaborate. As a culture, we like to celebrate everything Our weddings go on for sometimes a week, 10 days.