So, most of my pictures don’t have any posed quality and this was a very helpful thing in the whole quality of my work, this angle finder.

I could flatter myself in thinking our photographs brought Roosevelt in in ’36 overwhelmingly. But beyond that you can’t measure it.

In ’38, this time I did a job for Mr. Stryker. I went on his payroll at about half the salary I was getting before, to cover what he called Harvest in Ohio.

Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I’d done even years ago doing people. I couldn’t get interested in it. And I did hundreds...

I did take my camera along, as I felt there wouldn’t be enough time to draw the things I wanted to do. I did some drawing and did a lot of photography but I was...

In the South or in the mine country, wherever you point the camera there is a picture.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn’t have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn’t get as far as Hoboken at...

I didn’t care where my works were published.

It’s a little bit like my inability to read a guide book before I go anywhere. I can read it after I’ve been there and by the same logic I refuse to accept any technical...

If what any artist has to say is fundamentally human and profound the public will ultimately take his work unto itself. But if his own conceptions are limited and narrow in their human meaning it...

Whatever I get involved in, I’m totally involved, you see.

I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.

It’s pretty hard to measure influence of written or visual material.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn’t mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people...

When a man returned from the field and we’d look at the work, we’d criticize each other very genuinely and never offensively. And we would avoid all tricks, angle shots were just horrible to us.

I felt the function of a photograph was to have it seen by as many people as possible and the newspaper is one of the best ways or the magazine.

Now again, there are so many gadgets on cameras now that people abandon these simpler instruments for the more sure instruments.

An amateur is someone who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.

I felt very strongly the whole social impact of that depression, you know, and I felt very strongly about the efforts that this Resettlement Administration was trying to accomplish; resettling people, helping them, and so...

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.

The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti

I remember traveling around in Arkansas with Senator Robinson, and I told him what this little trick was. He felt very much part of it and had me take pictures of people unbeknownst to them.

Now, when I came on to Washington to begin my job, I was so interested in photography at that time that I really would have preferred to work with Stryker than with my department, which...

His every line of writing was art. And yet such art was inseparable from its life content.

I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.

Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you...

Self Portrait among the Churchgoers, 1939,

I was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.

Roy was just another bureaucrat to me, but I realized very soon that without Roy this thing would have died.

I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.

I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography – that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the...

So, I was offered this job to come down there but first it was suggested that I take a trip around the country in the areas in which we worked to see what it’s all...

I confess that Roy was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative....

I’ve been asked a great deal about the influence I’ve had with my work and it’s impossible to say, you know.