Quotes & Sayings About Snapshot Photography

Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional, or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world, to something perceived outside himself by the person who operates the camera. — Eliot Porter

[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world ... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it. — Claude Levi-Strauss

People believe pictures. It's a photograph that's in your passport, not a painting. Now,
George Bernard Shaw said, 'I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.' That's what the power of photography is. — Philip Jones Griffiths

I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot. — George Bernard Shaw

I was a make believe ethnographer: treating New Yorkers like an explorer would treat Zulus - searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography. — William Klein

Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. — Matt Hardy

Even though fixed in time, a photograph evokes as much feeling as that which comes from music or dance. Whatever the mode - from the snapshot to the decisive moment to multi-media montage - the intent and purpose of photography is to render in visual terms feelings and experiences that often elude the ability of words to describe. In any case, the eyes have it, and the imagination will always soar farther than was expected. — Ralph Gibson

The instant before something comes into focus is more exciting than any sharp certainty. Photography, child, is about the passing of time. Capturing is the goal of literature. Timelessness is the task of music and painting. But a good photograph holds time just as a vase holds water. The water will evaporate and the vase becomes a memorial to it. What separates a snapshot from a masterpiece is that the latter is a metaphor of patience ... — Miguel Syjuco

A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away. — Eudora Welty

It was the era of photography. This may have influenced us, and played a part in our reaction against anything resembling a snapshot of life. (On the year 1905) — Andre Derain

The idea that the snapshot would be thought of as a cult or movement is very tiresome to me and, I'm sure, confusing to others. It's a swell word I've always liked. It probably came about because it describes a basic fact of photography. In a snap, or small portion of time, all that the camera can consume in breadth and bite and light is rendered in astonishing detail: all the leaves on a tree, as well as the tree itself and all its surroundings. — Lee Friedlander

When I first made photographs, they were too plain to be considered art and I wasn't considered an artist. I didn't get any attention at all. The people who looked at my work thought, well, that's just a snapshot of the backyard. Privately I knew otherwise and through stubbornness stayed with it ... — Walker Evans

When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but ... my portrait is a culmination of elements ... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot. — Jamie Wyeth

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished. — Sally Mann

Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses. — Rebecca McNutt

We have a long history of snapshot photography that appeared to many to be more arbitrary and idiosyncratic than much of the work of professionals. We valued it for what it could tell us about the details of people's daily lives. — Fred Ritchin

In the '70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography. — Martin Parr

For the first time in the history of photography, we can study the real-time production of snapshot making - globally! (On Flickr and other photosharing websites) — Joachim Schmid

True photographs tend to remain on the streets, the story almost about to enter the edge of the frame of the snapshot or the shutter closing a moment too late, the story having just abandoned the frame. — Doug Rice