“Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact – to use Walt Whitman’s definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.”

Wherever there is disaster, the newsman is there. If he cannot find disaster, he searches for the odd and the peculiar, the exotic and the unfamiliar.

Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer – a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.

The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form.

The direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation, and discovery of the world of man and of nature.

The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy.

The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.

More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication.

We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.

It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

His photographs, seen by millions, make momentary events and strange occurrences all over the world our common property.

The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy.

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.

I operate the camera, I always do it when I’m the director, and I like to approach it as a documentary, finding the images based on what happens, as it happens.

Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it’s called documentary, which I suppose is all right … We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.

I’m fascinated by documentaries, to begin with. Because of the nature of television, as opposed to theatrical, documentaries can be in this long form and take you on a journey.

I dont see why people are so snooty about Channel Five. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap-dancing, and other related and vital subjects

I’m doing quite a few things now. In one day, I will go to Kassel, Germany, for a documentary project I’ve been preparing for half a year.

I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn’t want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject.

Even Vagabond – it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.