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.

It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.

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

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.

I've been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you. An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.