The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing).

A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.