A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.