Harold Feinstein Quotes

Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again --- it never would have been the same. Start stealing!

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.

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.

People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film.

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick...Like an animal and a prey.

It's pretty amazing to see a guy, while steering at the wheel, suddenly raise his little 300 dollar German camera with one hand and snap something that's on the move in front of him, and through an unwashed windshield at that. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958)

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.

Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality.

When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

The difficulty is capturing surprise on film.

All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot.

My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.

Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do - that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

One of my favorite photographers is Ruvan Wijesooriya, who takes most of the LCD photos. His work is incredibly colloquial and raw.

For my first book, 'New York,' I had one camera and two lenses. It was fotografia povera.

The subject gives you the best idea of how to make a photograph. So I just wait for something to happen.

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

My pictures are never pre-visualized or planned. I feel strongly that pictures must come from contact with things at the time and place of taking. At such times, I rely on intuitive, perceptual responses to guide me, using reason only after the final print is made to accept or reject the results of my work.

The most important thing... is not clicking the shutter... it is clicking with the subject.

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a 'decisive moment', that's true except that it shouldn't be taken too narrowly...does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That's a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it.

Very often people looking at my pictures say, 'You must have had to wait a long time to get that cloud just right (or that shadow, or the light).' As a matter of fact, I almost never wait, that is, unless I can see that the thing will be right in a few minutes. But if I must wait an hour for the shadow to move, or the light to change, or the cow to graze in the other direction, then I put up my camera and go on, knowing that I am likely to find three subjects just as good in the same hour.