The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

The photographer is like the cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

A photograph is not only an image ... it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper ... the photographer begins with the finished product.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Photography is for me the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event, as well as of a precise formal organization (i.e. composition) which brings that event to life.

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.