What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion. Sometimes you feel blessed with curiosity, sometimes you feel cursed with it.
I love the idea I can go off with a single camera and a few rolls of film unencumbered... I was not interested in the illusion of reality, I wanted to get close to what was happening.
It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.
What do you hang on the walls of your mind?
I can't hold a camera anymore.
What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing... if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph.
I realize that I had the best of serious picture journalism.
I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.
It doesn't matter if you use a box camera or you use a Leica; the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing.
Themes recur again and again in my work.
I had in mind a long career.
Lesson number one: Pay attention to the intrusion of the camera.
If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given.
I don't see anybody as either ordinary or extraordinary. I see them simply as people in front of my lens.
It's hard for me to assess what I brought because each time you pick up a camera and point it at a person, you're trying to define that person so to talk generally is difficult because I have to think of a given image in order to conjure up what we're talking about.
I realise that I had the best of serious picture journalism. There was an innocence in our approach, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when we naively believed that by holding a mirror up to the world we could help - no matter how little - to make people aware of the human condition.
I want the subject to be in control. Because they will give me something I couldn't possibly know about them.
What drove me and kept me going over the decades? If I had to use a single word, it would be 'curiosity.'
I came to photography by accident.
If you are careful with people, they will offer you part of themselves. That is the big secret.