“I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.”

I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.

We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect… but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assert themselves with finality. And that’s your picture.

The only nature I’m interested in is my own nature.

To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism.

For some reason or other there was in me the desire to see the world clean and fresh and alive, as primitive things are clean and fresh and alive. The so-called documentary picture left me wanting something.

Purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.

The only other things I got from the abstract expressionists is the absolute belief that this canvas is the complete total area of struggle, this is the arena, this is where the fight is taking place, the battle.

As photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as they approach, group and regroup as you shift your position.

If you look very intensely and slowly things will happen that you never dreamed of before.

When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).

However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.

It is no longer a matter of expressing reality, but of expressing what one feels about reality.

In any art, you don’t know in advance what you want to say – it’s revealed to you as you say it. That’s the difference between art and illustration.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.

The reflexive mechanism of the mind -or whatever it is that allows us to be self-conscious – is cut off or permanently suspended so the mind is ever after held in a fixed now moment out of which it cannot move in its uninterrupted gaze upon the Unknown

Do I believe in ghosts? Of course I do. So do you. Deep in the souls of the most sophisticated of us is lurking a fear of the supernatural which all the discoveries of scientists cannot eradicate.

To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom.

Discovery is new beginning. It is the origin of new rules that supplement, or even supplant, the old.

It was a huge deal, a huge musical discovery that became life lessons learned. You can’t return from having an experience like that. The Blind Boys are truly the deepest well of American musical heritage you can discover.

The basis of the discovery is imagination, careful reasoning and experimentation where the use of knowledge created by those who came before is an important component.

Every time a significant discovery is being made one sets in motion a tremendous activity in laboratories and industrial enterprises throughout the world.

Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do.