A Quote by Chris Killip

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

Quote Topics

Distance Endured Exists Historian History Lives Longer Make Moment Moments Most Myself Often Past People Photograph Photography Place Practice Rarely Real Some Specific Takes Think Those Time Viewpoint Ways Whatever Word Written

Quote Author

Chris Killip
Manx - Photographer
Born: July 11, 1946

One of the magical things about photography is the transformation that takes place when you photograph something. Something that inherently has very little going for it in terms of the interest you take in it, can become infinitely more interesting when rendered as a photograph. It's no longer a building. It's a photograph.

Grant Mudford

What a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look - at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools.

A. D. Coleman

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.

Errol Morris

But it is also untrue that I have nothing specific in mind. As with my landscapes: I see countless landscapes, photograph barely 1 in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph. I am therefore seeking something quite specific; from this I conclude that I know what I want.

Gerhard Richter

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

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

For a long time growing up, I thought that everything happens for a reason and it's kind of already written. But as I've grown and learned various things, I think that the most important moment is the one that you're in, and that's the only moment that matters, that you can really control. The future is unknown, and the past is history.

Christen Press

I think real humans are so complicated, and often [characters] are written more one-dimensional without maybe even the writer knowing it. I've felt numerous moments in my life where my most confident moment and my most insecure moment were exactly the same time. There's nothing funny or interesting about perfection.

Kristen Bell

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

Roni Horn

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

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.

John Berger

A movie as specific as 'Heathers,' which took place in a specific time and specific place and in which many of the characters got killed off, I never thought it made sense to see a sequel.

Michael Lehmann

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

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

There is no better moment than this moment, when we're anticipating the actual moment itself. All of the moments that lead up to the actual moment are truly the best moments. Those are the moments that are filled with good times. Those are the moments in which you are able to think that it is going to be perfect, when the moment actually happens. But, the moment is reality, and reality always kinda sucks!