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.
A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
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 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.
I’ve never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning – but some phase of photographer I’ve always been.
I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.
It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
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.
Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander. You have the power to increase his perceptions and conceptions.
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.
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. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were – their pride, their strength, their spirit.
I many times encountered courage, real courage. Undeniable courage. I’ve heard it said that that was the highest quality of the human animal. I encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it.
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.
No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.
It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.
I think we conjure up and invent people, and then whoever happens to be there is the recipient of our imagination. A good deal of the attraction between people, I think, is based on the fact that one is able to absorb the creation.