Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.

The 'content' of any medium is always another medium.

It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.

Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.

Fish did not discover water.

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.