Photographers may be concerned, conceptual, confrontational, candid, casual, constructing, but what is important is that they have a point of view. 

 I don’t think I have become more skillful a technician over time. I think I have become more skillful at finding pictures that fit a very simple technique... You have to learn what you can do well... My pictures reflect the fact that I’m trying as hard as I can, and I can’t do anything else. 

 To understand photographs, I believe you have to understand that the camera just shows what it shows. Photography may be moving, exciting, compassionate, or clever. But the camera cannot lie. Neither can a slide rule, a balance. If you want to lie, you have to do it with words. 

 Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture’s true beauty. 

 The world doesn’t happen in moments. The camera points at the world and the shutter opens and closes and turns the three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional image and the image is the reality you’re dealing with. The picture and the moment are synonymous and can never be repeated. 

 Occasionally we are misled by photography, but generally we have good reason to believe it. 

 You’ve only got a feeling that you have a picture when you’re shooting. All photographers have that feeling—but I think that was particularly so before the digital age. Now you can immediately see what you shot. 

 The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture’s true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he’s seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he’s not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer’s feet, very gently so there’s a little thrill.