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.

The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.

Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander. You have the power to increase his perceptions and conceptions.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don't know is how to photograph affluence - whose other face is poverty.

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

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

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.