I bought my first camera in Seattle, Washington. Only paid about seven dollars and fifty cents for it.

But I do feel a little teeny right now that I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.

The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs.

Enthusiasm is the electricity of life

I have always felt as though I needed a weapon against evil.

So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, '41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.

I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.