We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually. 

 The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy. 

 The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form. 

 It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing. 

 Attempts to mix photography and painting fail... On this point the masters are unanimous: the photographic image must not be tampered with. (1958) 

 It is peculiar to photography that, by the extreme ease of its production, many accidentally interesting photographs are produced. 

 Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give “vivification to fact”—to use Walt Whitman’s definition of the place of poetry in the modern world. 

 The fever for reality was running high. The physical aid of camera obscura and camera lucida had drawn men so near to an exact copying of nature and the satisfaction of the current craving for reality that they could not abide the intrusion of the pencil of man to close the gap. Only the pencil of nature would do.