Top 94 Moment Photography Quotes
#2. Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment."
John Loengard
#3. There comes a moment when it is no longer you who takes the photograph, but receives the way to do it quite naturally and fully.
Sebastiao Salgado
#5. Good films are not made by accident, nor is good photography. You can have good things happen, on occasion, by accident that can be applied at that moment in a film, but your craft isn't structured around such things, except in beer commercials.
Gordon Willis
#6. Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.
Miguel Syjuco
#7. What I love about photography, and it's the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can't be distracted, where you can't be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself.
Jessica Lange
#8. It's the subject matter that counts. I'm interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can't always see.
Harry Callahan
#9. Photography captures a moment in time. Art captures time in a moment.
Joyce Wycoff
#10. I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.
Jandy Nelson
#11. In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.
James Wilson
#12. What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
Karl Lagerfeld
#13. A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.
Ansel Adams
#14. They were both smiling so hard, it was surprising the frame could contain the happiness of that moment, surprising that it didn't shatter into a million pieces, floating all over the funeral home like dust.
Liz Welch
#15. Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities.
Michael Kenna
#16. Photography is about freezing a moment in time; McGinley's is about freezing a stage in a lifetime.
Jeffrey Kluger
#17. He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#18. If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.
Linda McCartney
#19. To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#21. Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#23. Sometimes, all you can take are memories
But if you're lucky enough to capture the moment,
it lives forever, immortally fixed.
Keegan Allen
#24. Photography's vaunted capture of a moment in time is the seizure and freezing of presence. It is the image of simultaneity, of the way that everything within a given space at a given moment is present to everything else; it is a declaration of the seamless integrity of the real.
Rosalind E. Krauss
#25. Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
Susan Sontag
#26. Defining moment in new telepathist's life, moment when intuitive individual learns most of society isn't telepathic, doesn't see auras,doesn't know what life on ethereal astral plane is like.
Christina Westover
#27. You think too much and I bet it kills the magic," he says simply. "Some things are just instinct and if you try and replace that with thinking they die. You can read and think as much as you want before and after, but in the moment, man, you have to, like, let go.
Blue GhostGhost
#28. Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses.
Rebecca McNutt
#29. Time runs and flows and only our death succeeds in catching up with it. Photography is a blade which, in eternity, impales the dazzling moment.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#30. What makes [photography] obscene is its terrible cruelty. Happiness may be fleeting, but it's the reason we go on living. Photography is the joy that precedes pain, the moment of life just before death.
Nobuyoshi Araki
#31. Out in the field I try not to hold expectations. I try to achieve an openness. The senses heighten so that I am totally immersed in what's happening at the moment. I want to be receptive to an image coming together.
Keith Lazelle
#32. Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times ... I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.
Elliott Erwitt
#33. Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you're alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there's everything, next moment it's gone. Photography is very philosophical.
Joel Meyerowitz
#34. Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.
Ben Shahn
#35. Photographs are so strange; they are always in the present tense, everyone captured in a moment that will never come again.
Natasha Solomons
#36. No image, however accomplished, could have captured the agonizing poignancy of that moment. It was a moment to be lived, not framed, analysed or reduced in any way.
Simon Roberts
#37. [Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world ... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#39. The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.
Tom Carter
#41. He'd never need a camera to remember this, and damn if he ever wanted anyone but him to see her like she was at this moment.
Kelly Moran
#42. For photography is a way to capture the moment - not just any moment, but the important one, this one moment out of all time when your subject is revealed to the fullest - that moment of perfection which comes once and is not repeated.
Edward Weston
#44. The world moves fast, changing everything around us with each new day. Photography is a gift that can keep us in a moment forever, blissfully eternal.
Ali Novak
#45. I use zero photography. I have a photographic memory and a complete knowledge of anatomy and physiology, and an interest in grasping the moment of what is happening, not just the outside, but the inside out.
Richard MacDonald
#46. I've always been obsessed with penetrating the female psyche. When I shoot, I'm like a tornado. I never sit down, never take a break, never eat. I'm focused on getting that moment of revelation, of insight, of poignancy, of meaning.
Joyce Tenneson
#47. I want pictures like these. The kind that can capture a moment, make it real, make it last. I need pictures that do more than reflect. I need pictures that are truth.
Lisa Mangum
#48. A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.
Eudora Welty
#49. As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.
Sam Abell
#50. Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.
Sam Abell
#51. As is often said of photography, this photograph is a frozen moment. A frozen moment is not a moment at all.
Roni Horn
#52. Photography is about a single point of a moment. It's like stopping time. As everything gets condensed in that forced instant. But if you keep creating these points, they form a line which reflects your life.
Nobuyoshi Araki
#53. Photography is like a moment, an instant. You need a half-second to get the photo. So it's good to capture people when they are themselves.
Patrick Demarchelier
#55. What I like so much about photography is precisely the moment that cannot be anticipated; one must be constantly on the alert, ready to acclaim the unexpected.
Martine Franck
#56. If you look at most photography, especially the pictures that grab you, they are not objective at all. Sometimes gut wrenching and sometimes lovely, but the moment someone decides to release the shutter, it is an editorial statement.
John Filo
#57. As photographers, we live through things so swiftly. All our experience and training is focused toward snatching off the highlights ... That all significant perfect moment, so essential to capture, is often highly perishable. There may be little opportunity to probe deeper.
Margaret Bourke-White
#58. What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art.
Raoul Hausmann
#59. Great photography comes about at the right time but it also needs the right cut that enhances that precise moment ... Photography must feed on both contents and form, if it gives up the one for the other it is not going to last.
Augusto De Luca
#60. We are living in a moment where we have broken the equilibrium of the planet. We are not paying attention to our intuitive side. We only pay attention to our reason. We have become an urban animal
Sebastiao Salgado
#61. I think that's the strength of photography - to decide the decisive moment, to click in the moment to come up with a picture that never comes back again.
Rene Burri
#62. When a moment in front of me appears to be particularly special, whether it be by beauty or experience, I capture it. I usually find a reason to justify taking that photo - symmetry, or color, or contrast - and it's my hope that my photography sheds light onto what I see and do on a daily basis.
Connor Franta
#63. Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character.
Hedi Slimane
#64. A good selfie is when you successfully capture the feeling of that very moment!
Anamika Mishra
#65. A mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.
Lee Friedlander
#66. Now, at a moment when photography is so pervasive that it's been forced to grapple with its own identity and look inward, it feels like a natural moment for painting to look out, to reclaim that directive of picturing America.
Cynthia Daignault
#67. Most of my photos are grounded in people, I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a persons face.
Steve McCurry
#68. [Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)
Pierre Mac Orlan
#69. My love of photography is melded with the ability to capture what I want to remember in the moment I want to never forget.
Devin Dygert
#70. Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.
John Szarkowski
#71. A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.
Jonathan Lethem
#72. True photographs tend to remain on the streets, the story almost about to enter the edge of the frame of the snapshot or the shutter closing a moment too late, the story having just abandoned the frame.
Doug Rice
#73. A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Richard Avedon
#74. Just as a fisherman cannot catch fish unless his line is in the water, a wildlife photographer cannot shoot great wildlife images unless he or she is out there with camera in hand and the knowledge of what to do then the 'magnificent moment' occurs.
George H. Harrison
#75. Photography speaks a universal language that does not need translation, and with an immediacy that the written word lacks. It freezes a moment in time, leaving an indelible image.
Bianca Jagger
#76. A photograph is a biography of a moment.
Art Shay
#77. The truth is that you have to fight your way through brutal, ugly realities in order to find that moment of clarity, that one slant of light or shift in emotion that yields unexpected art. That's just as true for life as it is for crime scene photography.
Maggie Ybarra
#78. In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there's this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.
Geoff Dyer
#79. The Photography is a chopper which in the eternity seizes the moment which dazzled it.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#80. A photograph isn't necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It's more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can't anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected.
Martine Franck
#81. To be ready is one thing, to be able to wait is another; but to seize the right moment is everything.
Arthur Schnitzler
#82. I was obsessed from the moment I took my first photograph. I wanted to make photography my career.
Giles Duley
#83. Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#84. It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal.
George A Tice
#85. Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.
Tony Benn
#87. My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.
Rene Burri
#88. There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.
Robert Frank
#89. We emphasized the creativeness that happens at the moment of seeing over the kind that takes place in the dark room.
Minor White
#90. The destination of the photograph is to reveal what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions, at a particular moment in time, and to transmit the results to others.
David Hurn
#91. I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me. There is such intensity in this image, such spontaneity, such joie de vivre, such miraculousness, that even today it still bowls me over.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#92. The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.
Edward Weston
#93. I am not interested in repetition. I don't want to reach the point from where I wouldn't know how to go further. It's good to set limits for oneself, but there comes a moment when we must destroy what we have constructed.
Josef Koudelka
#94. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
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