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

If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.

The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.

Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.

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 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.

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