... it came to me that what I had to do was to take pictures and concentrate upon people, only people, all kinds of people, people who paid me and people who didn't.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

To know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

You go into a room and you know where you're welcome; you know where you're unwelcome.Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.The people who are garrulous and wear their heart on their sleeve and tell you everything, that's one kind of person, but the fellow who's hiding behind a tree and hoping you don't see him is the fellow that you'd better find out why.