Capturing a Memory Quotes

Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

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.

I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude.

I'm not trying to write a perfect record. I'm just trying to nail a moment in time.

A photograph is a moment - when you press the button, it will never come back.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

Painting is as close as a person can get to actually capturing the heat of the moment.

I've never liked the moment of seeing something beautiful - a sunset, a moose, an elephant - and then raising a camera and trying to capture it for some future moment. That's always struck me as strange.

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.

To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn't exist before and couldn't exist after. It's almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you're dead - not them. To me, photography's always like that.

I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.

Real people move, they bear with them the element of time. It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.

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