The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

I can't verbalize the internal meaning of pictures whatsoever. Some of my friends can at very mystical levels, but I prefer to say that, if I feel something strongly, I would make a photograph, that would be the equivalent of what I saw and felt.

Art is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit.

The piano has eighty-eight keys, and you have to be able to play all of them. And the range of white to black is analogous to the eighty-eight keys and you have to be able to play all eighty-eight keys in that palette from white to black.

I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automated robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with.

This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.