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.

It is easy to make a picture of someone and call it a portrait. The difficulty lies in making a picture that makes the viewer care about a stranger.

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

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.

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.

Your photography is a record of your living - for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people's ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, 'I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.' He knew how insidious other people's ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.

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