You look at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and you see a shot, suddenly it all comes back—that was a nice day, you wanted a walk, your feet were hurting, you felt that you would hit on something. 

 I think the idea of a retrospective is good because a lot of things you put behind you. 

 I was very consciously trying to do the opposite of what Cartier-Bresson was doing. He did pictures without intervening. He was like the invisible camera. I wanted to be visible in the biggest way possible. (On his photography in the early 1950s) 

 Why must a photograph be a mirror? 

 With all these so-called great photographers—Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau—everything is so hunky dory. 

 I’ve noticed that in general the Paris of photographers... was romantic, foggy and above all, ethnically homogeneous. But for me, Paris was, as much as and perhaps more than New York, a melting pot. A cosmopolitan city, multicultural and totally multiethnic, whatever Le Pen thinks. 

 I saw the book I wanted to do as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, grainy, overinked, with a brutal layout, bull-horn headlines. This is what New York deserved and would get. 

 I spent six months in New York at that time [1954] and thought I had a book. So I went to publishers here, in New York, and got nowhere. Most of the people who looked at the photographs looked at the work and said “What kind of book is this? You make New York look like a slum.” I said, “Yeah, New York is a slum.” “What kind of New York are you showing me, everything black and awful?” I said, “No, you live on Fifth Avenue and your office is on Madison. You’ve never been to the Bronx, you’ve never been to Queens or Flatbush. This is the real New York.”