Nature photography... that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves.

The only things that distinguish the photographer from everybody else are his pictures: they alone are the basis for our special interest in him. If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason for faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker.

All these years you've been searching and looking and trying to change things, trying to add thing onto yourself, trying to acquire things when you have been the source of everything to begin with. Everything you've been looking for has been within yourself you have been that. You then begin to surrender everything to yourself. You surrender all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, you surrender all of your desires, all of your wants to the Self. You pull it in all inwardly.

Larry Schwarm's photographs of fire on the prairie are so compelling that I cannot imagine any later photographer trying to do better. His pictures convince us that seemingly far away events are close by, relevant to any serious person's life.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.

I've been so lonely trying to become a photographer. If I'd known that before, I don't know if I had the courage to do it again. You get to a point where you feel that you have something that is your own. And if you don't find an audience for it, you are going to burst.