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

Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon... We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.

Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion... the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

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.

No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.

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.