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

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

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.

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.

The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.

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.

Everybody believes that, but you have to really believe that and work that way.

That’s the thing about a folk tale: It is always addressing incredibly key issues about how you should live and what the right thing to do is, which is really what I’m the most interested in – like the questions that religion takes on.

I’m not too interested in books about India.

I think that, we as a culture, feel like politics is one sector of our lives that can feel apart from our personal lives and the cultural things we’re interested in and the sports we watch. It feels like this separate, different thing.

I’ve always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans – the original Americans.

Thomas Jefferson-another gorgeous white boy who would not have been interested in me. This was my problem in a nutshell. To get some play in Charlottesville, you had to be either a Martha Jefferson or a Sally Hemings.

I’m not trying to stump anybody… it’s the beauty of the language that I’m interested in.

You’ve got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.

I can’t imagine why you’re so interested.” he shook his head. “interested? We’re talking about you. I’m fascinated.