The very best pictures adapt themselves to many changes in meaning.

Photography was not invented to serve a clearly understood function. There was in fact widespread uncertainty, even among its inventors, as to what it might be good for.

Because we see reality in different ways, we must understand that we are looking at different truths rather than the truth and that, therefore, all photographs lie in one way or another.

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and vehicle of all its meanings.

One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.

The goal is not to make something factually impeccable, but seamlessly persuasive.

To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft.