I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.

If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you hava a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn’t the alphabed that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression.

For this very reason I refuse all the tricks of the trade and professional virtuosity which could make me betray my career. As soon as I find a subject which interests me, I leave it to the lens to record it truthfully. Look at the reporters and at the amateur photographer! They both have only one goal; to record a memory or a document. And that is pure photography.

I am not a surrealist. I am only a realist. All this group - surrealists - use my name. No, no, I am realist.

Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison detre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison detre, which lives on in itself.

Have confidence in the inventions and transformations of chance.

The most valuable things in a life are a man's memories. And they are priceless.