“Purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.”

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.

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.

As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.

There have been fraudulent efforts to persuade and deviously control that price. Based on what I have been told by members of the public, and reviewed in publicly available documents,

History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.

The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway.

The result is – document destruction – we’re really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we’re going to come to.

The Declaration of Independence has been called, with some justice, the most revolutionary document in human history.

There has been much talk referencing what I consider conceptual reports like the Landscape of Choice and documents created as a result of the Great Valley Center.

Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is a practical document for the use of practical men. It is not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; it is not a theory of government but a program of action.

Documentaries are a powerful and effective way of bridging the gap between worlds, breaking through to new audiences that wouldn’t otherwise be engaged – in essence, not preaching to the choir.