The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.

In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.

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

Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.

What's happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography?

Trained as a musician, [photographer Ansel] Adams understood the richness of variation that could be unfolded from a simple theme.

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.