go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

When you are doing a lot of hard fast field work, it's a physical necessity to forget every day. You can't try to remember it in any continuity. You get so burdened if you try to do it the other way. You can't dictate to your material... We found our way in, slid in on the edges. We used our hunches. And it was hard, hard living.

I've never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning - but some phase of photographer I've always been.