I'm not a nice girl; I'm a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )

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.

Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.

I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.

Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.

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.

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.