Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I'm the one to do it.

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever.

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times - the pulse of today.

Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.