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

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.

Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

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

Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.

You go into a room and you know where you’re welcome; you know where you’re unwelcome.

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

The words that come direct from the people are the greatest.If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.

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.