The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.

Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer - a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.

We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.

The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.

It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.