“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.”

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 second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework – that to me is the art of photography.

I wanted to combine science and photography in a sensible, unemotional way. Some people’s ideas of scientific photography is just arty design, something pretty. That was not the idea.

Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.

I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.

The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about.

I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.

Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself.

Self-conscious artiness is fatal, but it certainly would not hurt to study composition in general. Having a basic understanding of composition would help construct a better organized image.

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.

The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.

The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will; but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in.

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.

I’m myself – knowing I’m doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers.

People just don’t get as engaged in that kind of documentary – they don’t fall in love, they don’t cry, they don’t forget who they are, they don’t ride with you.

There’s a real difference between a documentary that was all about facts and history and information.

In my mind, there isn’t as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one.