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

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

The documentary photographer aims his camera at the real world to record truthfulness. At the same time, he must strive for form, to devise effective ways of organizing and using the material. For content and form are interrelated. The problems presented by content and form must be so developed that the result is fundimentally [sic] true to the realities of life as we know it. The chief problem is to find a form that adequately represents the reality.

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a 'decisive moment', that's true except that it shouldn't be taken too narrowly...does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That's a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it.

To be a photographer you must have something to say about the world.

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)

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.