I have been born again and again and each time, I have found something to love.
I have always felt as though I needed a weapon against evil.
You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery.
I do find a certain fascination with the unpredictable. The transitory years we wade through are what they are- what we make of them.
Success can be wracking and reproachful, to you and those close to you. It can entangle you with legends that are consuming and all but impossible to live up to.
I think maybe the rural influence in my life helped me in a sense, of knowing how to get close to people and talk to them and get my work done.
I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand.
I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.
I was born to a black childhood of confusion and poverty. The memory of that beginning influences my work today, It is impossible now to photograph a hungry child without remembering the hunger of my old childhood.
The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs.
Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer
I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil - along with the evil of racism - with a camera.
People in millenniums ahead will know what we were like in the 1930's and the thing that, the important major things that shaped our history at that time. This is as important for historic reasons as any other.
So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, '41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.
I bought my first camera in Seattle, Washington. Only paid about seven dollars and fifty cents for it.
But I do feel a little teeny right now that I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.
Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.
And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful for somebody as well.
I was there less than a year before I was assigned to the Paris bureau. I spent two years there and, in fact, before I even went on the staff I was sent to Europe to do assignments which they wouldn't normally do for a young photographer just starting out.
But I was very disappointed that I didn't get a chance to go overseas with that group, might not have gotten back but I wanted very much to go because there's not much of a record of the exploits of the first Negro fighter group.
I've been with Life now for seventeen years and I have written several articles for them and will be doing more writing and do at least two assignments a year besides my writing.
