“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.”

No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually … I know what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare look at ourselves.

This benefit of seeing…can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image…the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.

To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

The best way to go into an unknown territory is to go in ignorant, ignorant as possible, with your mind wide open, as wide open as possible and not having to meet anyone else’s requirement but your own.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can’t see watches you.

No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander.

To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention.

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight… The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

We have two physical eyes, but every pore of the body is also an eye.

The beauty in the losing is a loss finally of self-consciousness. There’s a gorgeous moment that can happen in all kinds of places. It can happen with people, it can happen with nature, and it can happen with my eyes shut anywhere I am.

It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle’s eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.

One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and read of the miseries which affect the world.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

I went to South Africa on safari and came eye to eye with a beautiful leopard. We were so close; I was staring at him for a long time and I felt a recognition with my own nature.

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.

I’ve looked that old scoundrel death in the eye many times but this time I think he has me on the ropes.