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

I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand.

I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.

I think maybe the rural influence in my life helped me in a sense, of knowing how to get close to people and talk to them and get my work done.

Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer

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'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.