Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.

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

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

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

They were ... pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection.

The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.

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.