Walker Evans Quotes

I think there are two types of photographers, those who want to document the world and those who want to create their own world. I am more interested in documenting the world and presenting it to people with the question attached, 'Does this make any sense to you?'

To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.

I realize that I had the best of serious picture journalism.

I'm always taking behind-the-scenes photos and stuff.

...candid still photography had taken over... What was interesting was that the photographs came without any intention of instructing you... You're like a cat looking out the window. You don't have to even know what you're watching, but you're watching it, and you're watching it very accurately.

Actually, documentary pictures include every subject in the world - good, bad, indifferent. I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

I go straight in very close to people and I do that because it's the only way you can get the picture. You go right up to them. Even now, I don't find it easy. I don't announce it. I pretend to be focusing elsewhere. If you take someone's photograph it is very difficult not to look at them just after. But it's the one thing that gives the game away. I don't try and hide what I'm doing - that would be folly.

I see things going on before my eyes and I photograph them as they are, without trying to change them. I don't warn people beforehand. That's why I'm a chronicler. I speak about us and I speak about myself.

And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.

To see, and to show, is the mission now undertaken by Life.

I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.

If I wasn't a comic or TV star, I really wanted to be a photojournalist. That was my other dream job.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

I think a lot of times, especially for certain stories, photographers travel together for safety reasons, and they also invariably cross paths. But you could have 10 photographers shooting together in the same spot but capturing different images.

'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.

I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

The most powerful weapon in the world, as far as I'm concerned, is the camera.

I'm kind of like a musical Bill Cunningham.

I came up in photography, and Dust Bowl-era photography is a lot of the reason that I got behind the camera in the first place.

My uncle was a photographer for 'The Irish Times.'

I became obsessed with the storytelling of photography and going on little adventures.

I like Ryan McGinley's work.

I kind of grew up with a camera in my hand.