I read the other day that Minor White said it takes twenty years to become a photographer. I think that is a bit of an exaggeration. I would say, judging from myself, that it takes at least eight or nine years. But it does not take any longer than it takes to learn to play the piano or the violin. If it takes twenty years, you might as well forget about it!

If Ansel Adams gets a thousand dollars a print, I want ten thousand.

I think of myself as an explorer who has spent his life on a long voyage of discovery.

All good art is abstract in its structure.

If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

No matter what lens you use, no matter what speed the film, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you can see.

I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces. Whatever life has done to them, it hasn’t destroyed them.