Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)

I don't care how you photograph - use the kitchen mop if you must, but if the product is not true to the laws of photography... you have produced something that is dead. (1923)

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

I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.

The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included.

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

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)