“My creative process begins when I get out with the camera and interact with the world. A camera is truly a license to explore. There are no uninteresting things. There are just uninterested people.”
Symbols
“What you look for is a symbol of something in everyone’s life. ”
Up to the Viewer
“I don’t like to describe my photographs; it’s up to the viewer to make up his mind what they are about. ”
Emancipation Day
“What is at the core of my work is, in essence, a meditation on being human.”
There it is
“I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn’t need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is.”
Impressions
“A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it? ”
Chance
“Chance is always there. The difference is a poor photographer meets chance one out of a hundred times and a good photographer meets chance all the time.”
Work it to Exhaustion
“Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion...the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate. ”
Nuance
“The best pictures differentiate themselves by nuances...a tiny relationship - either a harmony or a disharmony - that creates a picture.”
Tiptoeing
“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.”
Askew
“I look around the edges for those little askew moments.”
The Subject
“But it is never the subject that is so marvelous. It is how alive and real the photographer can make it. ”
Humanity
“There is one thing the photograph must contain - the humanity of the moment. ”
Arrange
"I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself." Diane Arbus
Poetic
"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." Robert Frank
Connection/Separation
"The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation." Susan Meiselas
Changed
"A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it." Irving Penn
Seeing
"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." Henry David Thoreau
The Lens
"The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera." Yousuf Karsh
Great Pictures
"A camera didn't make a great picture anymore than a typewriter wrote a great novel." Peter Adams