I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty. Here was every sensuous curve of the human figure divine but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.

I see no reason for recording the obvious.

A lifetime can well be spent correcting and improving one's own faults without bothering about others.

This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.

If I have any 'message' worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.

I see my finished platinum print (in the viewfinder) in all its desired qualities, before my exposure.

The photographer's most important and likewise most difficult task is not learning to manage his camera, or to develop, or to print. It is learning to see photographically — that is, learning to see his subject matter in terms of the capacities of his tools and processes, so that he can instantaneously translate the elements and values in a scene before him into the photograph he wants to make.