“It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.”

Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.

Photography helps people to see.

The photographer creates, evolves a better, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.

I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!

Suppose we took a thousand negatives… combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture.

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.

To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, more selective, more acute eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.

The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens’ vision are esthetically often a virtue.

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever.

I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality.

I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.

Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism – real life – the now.

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.

The concept of ‘peak oil’ has penetrated the hearts and minds of people concerned about energy for the future. ‘Peak fish’ occurred around the end of the 1980s.

I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth.

Anybody could say anything they want about me, and it literally never penetrates my skin.

If the lecture is good, then everything is too smooth. That’s the same in music: if the performance is too good, you really don’t enjoy it, because it just goes by, and you can never penetrate into the heart of it.

Great compassion penetrates into the marrow of the bone. It is the support of all living beings.

Take the armor off, so the arrow of the Truth can penetrate you.

You have to penetrate these and hear what your mind is telling you to do. Such work is original work.