“Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable.”

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.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.

You can’t tell a 6-year-old your sister is going to die.

I think it was 37 years that I did music.

Men aren’t the way they are because they want to drive women crazy; they’ve been trained to be that way for thousands of years. And that training makes it very difficult for men to be intimate.

The moral immune system of this country has been weakened and attacked, and the AIDS virus is the perfect metaphor for it. The malignant neglect of the last twelve years has led to breakdown of our country’s immune system, environmentally, culturally, politically, spiritually and physically.

It’s really important to keep sponsoring young people so the audience gets used to them and starts enjoying them. They’re the only way your show can keep going, otherwise it’s going to burn out in one or two years. Hopefully you’re creating your headliners of the future.

I think it’s tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.