If you place the imperfect next to the perfect, people will see the difference between the one and the other. But if you offer the imperfect alone, people are only too apt to be satisfied by it.

Technically perfect, pictorially rotten. (Stieglitz's standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer.)

I detest tradition for tradition's sake; the half-alive; that which is not real. I feel no hatred of individuals, but of customs, traditions; superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder-of fresh experience, freshly seen and communicated.

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.

I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.