“There is only one optimist. He has been here since man has been on this earth, a…” — Edward Steichen

A good daguerreotype was as perfect a kind of photograph as was ever made.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.

The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth.