A Quote by Marshall McLuhan
It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.
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The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.
If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive.
You've got a number of things that take place that are peculiar to still photography. One: how a picture looks - what you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks. In other words, it's responsible for the form.
It is often said that we are just a moment in time! In that case, here is the best challenge for man: To change this! To be two moments in time; three moments in time; four moments in time; to be in the whole of the time!
I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.
The puzzling thing is that there is really a curious coincidence between astrological and psychological facts, so that one can isolate time from the characteristics of an individual, and also, one can deduce characteristics from a certain time.
I fight to take a good photograph every single time.
It is hard to avoid the aspect of time when producing what ones sees as a photograph.... my images [are] something that is not a frozen moment, but an image made up of many moments and that is created over time rather than taken.
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.
The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.
There are moments that you suffer a lot, moments you won't photograph. There are some people you like better than others. But you give, you receive, you cherish, you are there. When you are really there, you know when you see the picture later what you are seeing.
Social media's currency is the single photograph. Whereas, every time I look at a photograph, I look at twenty or thirty photographs. I'm looking for a narrative. And that's a different kind of construct. If you're a poet and you put a line from your poem online, "The trees bending over gracefully," or something, you can get a tick. But that has nothing to do with your longer poem.
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.
The photograph is an undeniably powerful medium. Free from the constraints of language, and harnessing the unique qualities of a single moment frozen in time.
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.
Photographs offer more than decisive moments. They are not alone, they add and subtract and change with time. They are metaphors for our lives... Even a static photograph can change in the blink of a day or decade.
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