If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

Teachers don't work in the summer, and photographers don't shoot in in the middle of the day.

Working alone on stories, I began to feel the anonymity of motels on interstate highways reached by jet planes and rental cars. It was hard to have a good time, and the only way I could make the loneliness excusable was by taking pictures I thought were very good, even valuable.

The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill.

If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don't think this can be true for photography. Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty. We won't take an interest in it.

I was photographing the photographer Brassaï. He had very prominent eyes, like a frog's. As I focused my lens, he brought his hand up and pretended to focus his eye. It was a joke, but it added mystery to the picture. There's a sense of action in a very small world. Or with Allen Ginsberg there were people smoking cigarettes and in the smoke there's a sense of motion. It makes much out of very little.