“Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If not, the machine can destroy us.”

I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.

To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

The people who are garrulous and wear their heart on their sleeve and tell you everything, that’s one kind of person, but the fellow who’s hiding behind a tree and hoping you don’t see him is the fellow that you’d better find out why.

Being disabled gave me an immense advantage. People are kinder to you. It puts you on a different level than if you go into a situation whole and secure.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don’t know is how to photograph affluence – whose other face is poverty.

Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon… We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.

Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.

You know there are moments such as these when time stands still and all you do is hold your breath and hope it will wait for you.

I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were–their pride, their strength, their spirit.