Sketching the Moment
Category: Photographic Artistry
Poetry for Your Eyes
When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do
when they want to read a line of a poem... twice.
- Robert Frank
Momento Mori
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
Soulful Photography
When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes.
But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!
- Ted Grant
Sometimes their souls are colorful too.
Snap Decisions and Snap Shots
A photojournalist makes snap decisions; based on the ability
to quickly assess situations and record one’s perceived truth.
- Jack Dykinga
This applies not just to photojournalists, but to all photographers in general.
There's a reason they're called snapshots.
Trust and Rapport
All the planning, intuition, technical prowess, and knowledge,
as well as the trust and rapport you have (or haven’t) established,
will show up in the picture, frozen forever.
- Gregory Heisler
This is something that many photographers, including myself, sometimes forget. It can really hurt a potentially great photo shoot.
Hold Your Breath
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
Creativity
You don’t make a photograph just with a camera.
You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen,
the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
– Ansel Adams
Secret Secrets
A picture is a secret about a secret,
the more it tells you the less you know.
– Diane Arbus
What is Photography?
