Equipment makes my job easier, but it doesn't affect my style.
. . . . . . so called “composition” becomes a personal thing, to be developed along with technique, as a personal way of seeing.
Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn't photogenic.
If I have any 'message' worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.
I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty. Here was every sensuous curve of the human figure divine but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.
The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it.
Now, to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk.
New York City is a place where you can lock yourself up in your little studio apartment, and not go outside at all, and not feel in the slightest guilty about it.
If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. . . . There is no believing without some doubting, and believing is all the stronger for understanding and resolving doubt.
The time for running has come to an end. You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!
As we each express our natural genius, we all elevate our world.