Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze. - Alfred Stieglitz

Atmosphere is the medium through which we see all things. In order, therefore, to see them in their true value on a photograph, as we do in Nature, atmosphere must be there. Atmosphere softens all lines; it graduates the transition from light to shade; it is essential to the reproduction of the sense of distance. That dimness of outline which is characteristic for distant objects is due to atmosphere. Now, what atmosphere is to Nature, tone is to a picture.

AS A KID I WAS PROMISED an America - An America I believed in - and I insist on living - and dying - in that America, even I have to create it myself.

I know exactly what I have photographed [in his series 'Equivalents', 1925 - 1934]. I know I have done something that has never been done.. .I also know that there is more of the really abstract in some 'representation' than in most of the dead representations of the so-called abstract so fashionable now.