I have no need to kiss the stars and stripes. This country makes welcome only those who do. America the beautiful. O say can you see. Beggars in the subway? Fat women in furs?... Capitalism, the American century, it is an arrogance. (At the beginning of his 1947 trip to the United States.) 

 What is photojournalism? Occasionally, a very unique photo, in which form is precise and rich enough and content has enough resonance, is sufficient in itself—but that’s rarely the case. The elements of a subject that speak to us are often scattered and can’t be captured in one photo; we don’t have the right to force them together, and to stage them would be cheating... which brings us to the need for photojournalism. 

 Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should? While we’re working, we must be conscious of what we’re doing. Sometimes we have the feeling that we've taken a great photo, and yet we continue to unfold. We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole. 

 The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera. 

 As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s own originality. It is a way of life. 

 If a photograph is to communicate its subject in all its intensity, the relationship of form must be rigorously established. Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things. What the eye does is to find a focus on the particular subject within the mass of reality; what the camera does is simply to register upon film the decision made by the eye. We look at and perceive a photograph as a painting, in its entirety and all in one glance... One does not add composition as though it were an afterthought superimposed on the basic subject material, since it is impossible to separate content from form. Composition must have its own inevitability about it. 

 They opened fire on you with bullets, but just think of your camera as a flamethrower and a lot more effective. (On South African police firing on photojournalists during Apartheid.)  

 In photojournalistic reporting, inevitably, you’re an outsider.