A Quote by Art Shay

A photograph is a biography of a moment.

Art Shay

Quote Topics

Biography Moment Photograph

Quote Author

Art Shay
American - Photographer
Born: March 31, 1922

A photograph it a souvenir of a memory. It is not a moment. It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.

David Levithan

Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.

William Golding

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

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

Jacques Derrida

I don't know how much a photograph can add to a biography, the way a film or writing or narrative medium could. Because it's a frozen image.

Stephen Shore

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

The moment you make a photograph you consign whatever you photograph to the past as that specific moment no longer exists, it is history. The photography that I practice takes place in a specific time and place, depicting real moments in people's lives. In some ways I think of myself as a historian, but not of the word. History is most often written from a distance, and rarely from the viewpoint of those who endured it.

Chris Killip

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

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.

Paul Strand

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

Susan Sontag

While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.

Minor White

How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

Duane Michals

When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!

Ted Grant

As is often said of photography, this photograph is a frozen moment. A frozen moment is not a moment at all.

Roni Horn

Part of the mystery of any given photograph is the fact that it was taken at a certain time and in a certain place and time keeps moving on. A photograph might be a moment in time preserved, but the world continues to change around it.