One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

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.

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.

Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If not, the machine can destroy us.

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.

I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were--their pride, their strength, their spirit.

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.