With a camera like that you don't believe you're in the masterpiece business. It's enough to be able to peck at the world.

The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue.

... a mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.

Anything that looks like an idea is probably just something that has accumulated, like dust. It looks like I have ideas because I do books that are all on the same subject. That is just because the pictures have piled up on that subject. Finally I realize that I am really interested in it. The pictures make me realize that I am interested in something.

The idea that the snapshot would be thought of as a cult or movement is very tiresome to me and, I'm sure, confusing to others. It's a swell word I've always liked. It probably came about because it describes a basic fact of photography. In a snap, or small portion of time, all that the camera can consume in breadth and bite and light is rendered in astonishing detail: all the leaves on a tree, as well as the tree itself and all its surroundings.

The world makes up my pictures, not me.

... photographs are so loaded with information. They're remarkable. As I said, you get both the tree and the forest.