My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history..

The camera is the eye of history..

No one will ever know what I went through to secure those negatives. The world can never appreciate it. It changed the whole course of my life..

From the first, I regarded myself as under obligation to my country to preserve the faces of its historic men and mothers.

I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'go,' and I went..