Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.

What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?

I was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.

I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

The artist must operate on the assumption that the public consists in the highest order of individual; that he is civilized, cultured, and highly sensitive both to emotional and intellectual contexts. And while the whole public most certainly does not consist in that sort of individual, still the tendency of art is to create such a public - to lift the level of perceptivity, to increase and enrich the average individual's store of values... I believe that it is in a certain devotion to concepts of truth that we discover values.

I confess that Roy [Stryker] was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time.