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

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 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.

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.

Even back in the ’90s, I shot certain things on something that wasn’t digital then, but it was on VHS with a smaller camera and we would up it to film.

I don’t like horror, which is ridiculous because I’ve been in three horror movies, but when I see those things, I see camera tricks and fake blood and actors screaming and I don’t know understand why other actors don’t see that.

The camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head!

I hope I’m able to achieve more on camera through stillness, through focus, through being quite careful to do less on every take, rather than more. So I’m reducing, rather than adding. Which hopefully is a good exercise. That’s what I’d like to do.

I try to preserve the dynamics of the street, and my way of using the camera tries to approximate as much as possible the way we see: focusing on details, opening up to wider angles, and composing all these very short, fragmented impressions into a larger mental picture.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

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.