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

The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy.

Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.

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.

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.

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.

The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different.