"I don’t need them to tell me what it feels like to be poor … I already know how this feels, how it smells and how it tastes! When I talk to them … I want them to tell me about their hopes and aspirations, about their dreams… about the road ahead and how they imagine it will shape up out in front of them to make the dreaming and hoping come true. I ask them about assistance, about the health, and about their families near or far."

“Maybe by doing this work and putting my name on the front line, like a science project, will also afford me the opportunity to embarked into a very special opportunity to show that growing up poor doesn't have to mean being unworthy or forgettable. This is a very important lesson for those who propagate such narrow minded universally accepted inaccuracies about poverty.”

“Thoughts on Photography with Paul Giguere Interview with Manuel Rivera-Ortiz”

“Manuel Rivera-Ortiz’s photographs of people living in poor villages in Turkey and Thailand, Bolivia and India don’t falsely romanticize their subjects’ poverty nor do they explicitly critique the political or economic systems that create such conditions. By focusing purely on the people who populate the poor global villages he visits, he captures the entire range of human emotion: mistrust, fear, curiosity, friendliness, happiness. Social critique may simmer below the surface of his work, but the primary message of Rivera-Ortíz’s images seems to be that hope and creativity are not mutually exclusive to poverty.”

“When I am in India I gravitate to the poor and forgotten; in the fields I love photographing the workers who eek out a living and a little bit of food from the earth. All of this has everything to do with this area, as Western New York has many people working in the fields as migrant families.”

“The Jeff Farias Show Interview with Manuel Rivera-Ortiz”

“Showing poverty is such a large part of my work because another thing that I am finding is that for me personally, doing this work helps me in trying to come to grips with my own upbringing and all that occurred during that time. Basically, this work to me is a sort of time for reflection, a pseudo inventory of "this is your life," a way to try to accept the concept of what was so inevitable.”