A Quote by Steve McCurry
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.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
As is often said of photography, this photograph is a frozen moment. A frozen moment is not a moment at all.
A still photograph is something which you can always go back to. You can put it on your wall and look at it again and again. Because it is that frozen moment. I think it tends to burn into your psyche. It becomes ingrained in your mind. A powerful picture becomes iconic of a place or a time or a situation.
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.
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.
There are certain mystical belief systems that believe that taking pictures takes an aspect of the soul, but beyond that it's just the idea that once you're captured in a photograph, then a million presumptions are made of you, and you are forever frozen in that one moment, and you are perceived to be the embodiment of that moment, and that, of course, is an illusion.
When you are cast for a role, it's because of everything that makes you who you are in that moment in time. No one else has that. That's a unique, powerful thing to hold.
I always loved the idea that a photograph was a memory frozen in time.
Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community.
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.
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.
Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right.
Spoken language clearly differentiates Homo sapiens from all other creatures. None but humankind produces a complex spoken language, a medium for communication and a medium for introspective reflection.
Talk about painting: there's no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can't be said but are always the most important.
If you photograph for a long time, you get to understand such things as body language. I often do not look at people I photograph, especially afterwards. Also when I want a photo, I become somewhat fearless, and this helps a lot. There will always be someone who objects to being photographed, and when this happens you move on.
Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.
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.
Related Authors
Ambrose Bierce Quotes
American
Journalist
Andy Rooney Quotes
American
Journalist
Ann Coulter Quotes
American
Journalist
Anna Quindlen Quotes
American
Journalist
Bill Vaughan Quotes
American
Journalist
Dave Barry Quotes
American
Journalist
Dennis Prager Quotes
American
Journalist
Erma Bombeck Quotes
American
Journalist
Fran Lebowitz Quotes
American
Journalist
George Will Quotes
American
Journalist
Glenn Beck Quotes
American
Journalist
Hunter S. Thompson Quotes
American
Journalist
Mignon McLaughlin Quotes
American
Journalist
Molly Ivins Quotes
American
Journalist
Rachel Maddow Quotes
American
Journalist
Walter Lippmann Quotes
American
Journalist