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

A camera has interesting ideas of its own.

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

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's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.

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.

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.