Capture Photography Quotes

What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.

It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....

To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.

I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever…it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

It's amazing how photography can capture just a split second of something exquisite.

I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that.

No, you don't shoot things. You capture them. Photography means painting with light. And that's what you do. You paint a picture only by adding light to the things you see.

A camera is just a medium to capture what you have in your vision, and vision is something that cannot be bought.

I live for my photography, but I will die to capture him in my camera.

We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others. We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

they signaled my eternal gratitude to the boy sitting silently in the dark. The boy as gifted at photography as I was at music. He was my heart. The heart freely given to me as a child. The heart that made up one half of my own. The boy who, though breaking inside, loved me so deeply that he gave me this farewell. Gave me, in the present, the dream that my future never could. My soul mate who captured moments.

As a photographer you have a deep love for light, life and yourself. You know that the eyes of love aren’t blind, they are wide open. Only when your eye, heart and soul shine brighter than the sun, you realize how ordinary it is to love the beautiful, and how beautiful it is to love the ordinary.

Photography has shaped the way I look at the world; it has taught me to look beyond myself and capture the world outside.

When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don't leave until you have captured its essence.

A good selfie is when you successfully capture the feeling of that very moment!

Photographs are so strange; they are always in the present tense, everyone captured in a moment that will never come again.

Any moment which is not captured is loss in the events of time.

It’s the power of photography. To capture it and let it live past the subject’s lifetime. To allow someone to look at it years later and smile along with them.

Frozen in time, captured in memories, filled in passion, she melted in love before his eyes.

But the real attraction of such technology has never been about capturing reality. Photography, videography, holography... the progression of such “reality-capturing” technology has been a proliferation of ways to lie about reality, to shape and distort it, to manipulate and fantasize. People shape and stage the experiences of their lives for the camera, go on vacations with one eye glued to the video camera. The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality.

If you don’t capture the moments, it will be gone forever.

My love of photography is melded with the ability to capture what I want to remember in the moment I want to never forget.

Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Sometimes, all you can take are memories But if you’re lucky enough to capture the moment, it lives forever, immortally fixed.

Our eyes captures thousands of beautiful pictures everyday.

Photoshop and Lightroom help me transform my photos into what my heart felt, but my camera couldn't quite capture!

Capture every moments of your life.

She capture the hidden mystery that gives a special flavor to the photograph ...

i found my flower, there she was, she caught my eye and captured my heart. i listened to her...she called out to me with her colors and warmth, held me with her softness and beauty, silently asking only that i let her grow, and let her be, and love her for who she was: my flower

Unlike cooking, photography kept you on your toes. It was chaotic and human -- utterly unpredictable. to capture an unposed face you had to wait for it. It was spear fishing. you had to move between the competing rhythms of the world and strike.

I didn’t know why, but capturing moments fascinated me. Maybe it was because sometimes all we get are moments. There are no do-overs; whatever happens in a moment defines life—perhaps it is life. But capturing a moment on film keeps that moment alive, forever. To me, photography was magic.

Collect moments rather than things. Moments get away.

When the reality looks magnificent, a real art of photography has only one choice: To capture this beauty magnificently!

The best part of photography is capturing a moment of humanity and freezing it forever.

To me, the world and art of photography is to capture emotion, feelings and moments; and share it with the world. I master the art when I am capable of awaking emotion in other people through my images.

Photography has shaped the way I look at the world; it has taught me to look beyond myself and capture the world outside. It’s also taught me to cherish the life I return to when I put the camera down. My work makes me better able to love my family and laugh with my friends.

It's a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past, should exist only in memories glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photography forces us to see people before their future weighed down on them. Before they knew their endings.

Unlike cooking, photography kept you on your toes. It was chaotic and human—utterly unpredictable. To capture an unposed face you had to wait for it. It was spear fishing. You had to move between the competing rhythms of the world and strike.

People always said that photography is an attempt to capture something fleeting. And suddenly everything is fleeting. It's like Ardor is this special tone of light we've never had before, and it's shining down and infusinf every single object and person on the planet. I just want to document that light, before it's gone. -Eliza

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...

Capture the moment. It is your only sacred-memory.

Photography captures a moment in time. Art captures time in a moment.

The less gear you use, the more you grow as a photographer. Although there are fewer options available, you'll find more creative ways to capture what you feel! In a way, all your technical options before turn into creative solutions that improve your photography even more.

We can all take pictures but not everyone can capture the beauty that's usually hidden in plain view... We can all open our mouth to sing but not everyone can melodically touch your soul... We can all pick up a pen to write but not everyone can write words in such a way that they leap off of the page for you... We can all part our lips to speak but not everyone can speak life into you... We can all move our bodies to a beat but not everyone can become one with music, stir emotions and shift energy with dance... Point is: WE CAN all do something but Know your gifts, cultivate them and ALWAYS, ALWAYS BE YOURSELF! Then working together becomes effortless. Copies aren't accepted everywhere...ORIGINALS are eventually required!

I create other worlds, magical never-never lands where the camera is my weapon and the battles I fight are with the elements. i stretch the laws of the mind and displace people from their realities to capture a side of them they didn’t even know they had. Photography has the ability to freeze people in this time and space—no matter what happens after that moment, it cannot change—they are exactly how i want them to be.

He sought a way to preserve the past. John Hershel was one of the founders of a new form of time travel.... a means to capture light and memories. He actually coined a word for it... photography. When you think about it, photography is a form of time travel. This man is staring at us from across the centuries, a ghost preserved by light.

It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.

Like my maestro, Juan Ribero, she believed that photography and painting are not competing arts but basically different: the painter interpets reality, and the camera captures it. In the former everything is fiction, while the second is the sum of the real plus the sensibility of the photographer. Ribero never allowed me sentimental or exhibitionist tricks-none of this arranging objects or models to look like paintings. He was the enemy of artificial compostion; he did not let me manipulate negatives or prints, and in general he scorned effects of spots or diffuse lighting: he wanted the honest and simple image, although clear in the most minute details.

When this house was built, people used daggers and their fingers,” he said. “And it’ll probably last until the days when men dine off capsules.” “Fancy asking friends to come over for capsules,” I said. “Oh, the capsules will be taken in private,” said Father. “By that time, eating will have become unmentionable. Pictures of food will be considered rare and curious, and only collected by rude old gentlemen.

He sought a way to preserve the past. John Hershel was one of the founders of a new form of time travel.... a means to capture light and memories. He actually coined a word for it... photography. When you think about it, photography is a form of time travel. This man is staring at us from across the centuries, a ghost preserved by light.

Photos which captures human sadness are the noblest and the most meaningful of all the photos!

Photography. There is something obscene here, desire to capture, imprison incorporate.

Any moment which is not captured is loss in events of time.

On 6 January 1839 the Gazette de France made the momentous announcement of Louis Daguerre’s discovery of a photographic process,

Every experience has a pattern and sometimes it teaches us through the spirit of patience captured, that there are no coincidences in life.

If we continually let go of the moments, we let go of who we are and we lose ourselves.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

Let’s not only take great photos, but let’s make great photos with our lives.

I think the thing i like about photography is that the image you capture will always be unique , never to be captured that way again.

Capture the moment, that is all the miracle there is.

To capture the moment isn't photography. Neither it is to capture the emotions. To capture both is what I call photography.

…I was reminded of how much I love photography. The chance to capture a moment of time, forever.

I love when I capture moments of expression.

The moment defines the memories.

It doesn't matter whether you are an expert or a novice in photography. As long as the lense of your camera fucoses the "nature" as a subject, you will always capture the best picture.

I’m not sure, though, what “for later” means anymore. Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven’t understood the exact way we are now experiencing time. And maybe the boy’s frustration at not knowing what to take a picture of, or how to frame and focus the things he sees as we all sit inside the car, driving across this strange, beautiful, dark country, is simply a sign of how our ways of documenting the world have fallen short. Perhaps if we found a new way to document it, we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time. Novels and movies don’t quite capture it; journalism doesn’t; photography, dance, painting, and theater don’t; molecular biology and quantum physics certainly don’t either. We haven’t understood how space and time exist now, how we really experience them. And until we find a way to document them, we will not understand them.

Look― shoot all you want. With a camera you can barely capture a soul at a time. With planned obsolescence, you can terminate everyone's future at once and they'll never know what hit them.

Sex, or masturbation, is the only experience that millions of people are able to truly enjoy, despite their knowing that it has not been, is not being, and will not be captured to be shared on social media.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but is 400% less valuable, because a picture only captures one of the senses—sight. However, words can describe the other four senses, making writing four times more potent than photography.

To the degree its ephemeral, the social photo does the opposite: it interrupts the traditional photographic mode of fixing the present as impending history, positing instead a captured moment that is indifferent to such recording.

The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist’s inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.

capturing moments fascinated me. Maybe it was because sometimes all we get are moments. There are no do-overs; whatever happens in a moment defines life—perhaps it is life. But capturing a moment on film keeps that moment alive, forever. To me, photography was magic. I

but capturing moments fascinated me. Maybe it was because sometimes all we get are moments. There are no do-overs; whatever happens in a moment defines life—perhaps it is life. But capturing a moment on film keeps that moment alive, forever. To me, photography was magic.

I didn’t know why, but capturing moments fascinated me. Maybe it was because sometimes all we get are moments. There are no do-overs; whatever happens in a moment defines life—perhaps it is life. But capturing a moment on film keeps the moment alive, forever. To me, photography was magic.

. I thought that was why, as I stood before a painting of a young girl in half-light, there was something that was both guarded and vulnerable in her gaze. It was not the contradiction of a single instant, but rather it was as if the painter had caught her in two separate states of emotion, two different moods, and managed to contain them within the single image. There would have been a multitude of such instants captured in the canvas, between the time she first sat down before the painter and the time she rose, neck and upper body stiff, from the final sitting. That layering—in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity—was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography. I wondered if that was the reason why contemporary painting seemed to me so much flatter, to lack the mysterious depth of these works, because so many painters now worked from photographs.

Craig Varjabedian’s photography captures, with arresting clarity, the ineffable whispers of time and spirit layered deep in New Mexico’s cultural landscape. Through the artful combination of his compassionate eye and technical virtuosity, he evokes the past in the present and the holy in the everyday.

I have always loved being behind the camera. I love how it sets you apart in a crowd, so that you can float at the edges, pausing only occasionally to capture a moment. In its own way it’s easier than writing. As a writer, I have to know people, to talk to them, to barge into silences with a dozen of those little lighthearted quips that lead up to a conversation. And even then, they’re guarded around you. Nobody wants their drunken conversation written down somewhere. Being a photographer is different. People come to you. They smile. They flirt. They make sure you see only their best side. Nobody wants to upset the camera.

The sun and wind pour into the sheets on the line. There are bodies in the billowing, forms created and lost in a breath. He takes photo after photo with his ruined film, to hold them there. This is what, long ago, made him fall in love with photography: the paying of attention, the capturing of time. He’d forgotten exactly this.

took it with me everywhere, snapping thousands of pictures. I didn’t know why, but capturing moments fascinated me. Maybe it was because sometimes all we get are moments. There are no do-overs; whatever happens in a moment defines life—perhaps it is life. But capturing a moment on film keeps that moment alive, forever. To me, photography was magic.

I took it with me everywhere, snapping thousands of pictures. I didn’t know why, but capturing moments fascinated me. Maybe it was because sometimes all we get are moments. There are no do-overs; whatever happens in a moment defines life—perhaps it is life. But capturing a moment on film keeps that moment alive, forever. To me, photography was magic.

With a vintage lens and an eye on regional America, Varjabedian captures both the spirit of place and the sense of enduring culture in the southwest. His imagery comments upon landscape, culture, and how the two influence and imprint each other. Sometimes tinged with religiosity, sometimes humorous, his photographs have an intense clarity that befits his subject: New Mexico.

We believe our eyes capture images from the world like a camera, then relay these images to our brain. Our eyes “photograph,” say, the coffee mug in front of us. It’s a nice model. It is also wrong. Seeing is less like photography and more like language. We don’t see the world so much as converse with it. What is that? Looks like a coffee mug, you say? Let me check my database and get back to you. Yep, it’s a

The wish to capture evanescent reflections, is not only impossible, as has been shown by thorough German Investigation, but the mere desire alone, the will to do so, is blasphemy. God created man in His own image, and no man-made machine may fix the image of God. Is it possible that God should have abandoned His eternal principles, and allowed a Frenchman in Paris to give to the world an invention of the Devil

If you don’t do anything to capture and draw your memories—no matter whether you choose words, pencil, photography, or filming—the only place where they have a chance to exist is in your head, which can’t be called the most reliable place to store them; soon, they’d be lost forever… leaving no trace, like they never existed… like YOU never existed… same as those billions and billions of lives that had already disappeared from the world.

In order to know someone who is at some level unknowable, you must leave yourself wide open. If you don't, you foreclose the possibility of learning something critical about this person you need, your parent, the person upon whom your survival depends. It's like time-lapse photography; your lens at maximum aperture in order to capture something fleeting and elusive. The problem becomes one of calibration. How to protect yourself in the process. How to capture something without going blind.

The sight of this woman infringing on the privacy of others so aggressively and casually sent revulsion through my entire being. What was she doing? Hunting big game? Were the people in this small village home just a quarry to be stalked, a trophy later to be mounted on the wall? It was one of those moments when I felt ashamed to be linked with this thing we call photography. We photographers “shoot” and “capture”. We may insist that we “make” a photograph, but everyone knows we really take them.

Vanity is by far my favorite of all sins, and the camera lens is the ultimate vanity mirror. The camera captures all moods and nuances; immortalizes the soft and silky continuum that is humanity. Those still life moments seem so fluid, so representative of continuity. They are a single moment captured, yet an eternity expressed. All your youth; all your ages, captured and expressed in a single click. Of all the indulgences, vanity is certainly my favorite which we should otherwise resist, but are inexplicably captivated by and addicted. What other animal would spend so much time pouting and preening for its reflection? Only humanity would participate in such self-adoration. You would think we have the most colorful feathers or softest of manes. Rather, we are a naked biped that feels incomplete without some decorative element, accessory, or embellishment of the self. We are intoxicated by the image of the body, no different than we are seduced by fine wines, foods, or mind altering elements. We devour the skin, and peel away clothes as if they were the skin of some tropical fruit, covering a colorful and juicy interior. We hunt for bodily pleasures, and collect them as prizes; show them off in social situations as if our companions were some sort of extended adornment to ourselves. We are revealed in our sensuality. To touch beneath the surface; to connect beyond facades, that unattainable discourse between individuals is put tentatively within reach in intimacy. To capture those moments is to capture the essence of what makes us human, and what ultimately sets us above and aside from the rest of nature. Capturing humanity in its most extravagant expressions is intoxicating. Vanity is by far my favorite sin, and it is an endless tale as infinite as humanity. Every person is but a stitch in a giant tapestry.

She was my champion. She was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth. Capturing me in images. Saving all my documents and possessions. She had all knowledge of my being memorized. The time I was born. My unborn cravings. The first book I read. The formation of every characteristic. Every ailment and little victory. She observed me with unparalleled interest. Inexhaustible devotion. Now that she was gone, there was no one left to ask about these things. The knowledge left unrecorded died with her. What remained were documents and my memories. And now it was up to me to make sense of myself, aided by the signs she left behind. How cyclical and bittersweet, for a child to retrace the image of their mother. For a subject to turn back to document the archivist… The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes and I had to seize it, foster it, so it did not die in me, so that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.

The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know. It had more than information and accuracy to teach me. I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn't hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture, and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words - there's so much more of life that only words can convey - strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. The direction my mind took was a writer's direction from the start, not a photographer's or a recorder's.

I despise people who are forever taking pictures and go around with cameras hanging from their necks, always on the lookout for a subject, snapping anything and everything, however silly. All the time they have nothing in their heads but portraying themselves, in the most distasteful manner, though they are quite oblivious of this. What they capture in their photos is a perversely distorted world that has nothing to do with the real world except this perverse distortion, for which they themselves are responsible. Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity, which is not only enamored of such distortion and perversion but completely sold on them, and will in due course, given the proliferation of photography, take the distorted and perverted world of the photograph to be the only real one. Practitioners of of photography are guilty of one of the worst crimes it is possible to commit--of turning nature into a grotesque. The people in their photographs are nothing but pathetic dolls, disfigured beyond recognition, staring in alarm into the pitiless lens, brainless and repellent. Photography is a base passion that has taken hold of every continent and every section of the population, a sickness that afflicts the whole of humanity and is no longer curable. The inventor of the photographic art was the inventor of the most inhumane of all arts. To him we owe the ultimate distortion of nature and the human beings who form part of it, the reduction of human beings to perverse caricatures--his and theirs. I have yet to see a photograph that shows a normal person, a true and genuine person, just as I have yet to see one that gives a true and genuine representation of nature. Photography is the greatest disaster of the twentieth century.

I thought back on the sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic faces, the ones I'd once scorned for hurling their bodies at the worst things in life. Perhaps they had known something terrible about the world. Perhaps they so wilingly parted with the security and sanctity of the black body because neither security nor sanctity existed in the first place. And all those old photography's from the 1960s, all those films I beheld of black people prostrate before clubs and dogs, were not simply shameful, indeed were not shameful at all -- they were just true. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.

In the past, people were vaguely fearful of photographs, believing the camera's exact reproduction of their own image would steal their souls. Not only did these images survive for much longer than their subjects, they were also endowed with an aura of magic the subjects lacked. A superstition, but one whose traces can still be felt today. People sense that the photograph captures an uncanny moment in the interstices of reality, enhancing reality's eeriness, the root of which is unknown, and fixing that moment in place like a death mask. Photography differs from the art of painting in that capturing or exposing such a moment happens neither at the will of the photographer nor the one who is photographed. What is photographed is a ghost moment, clothed in matter. Photography is the dream of comprehensive meaning. Each object has parts of itself that are invisible. This territory, which neither the photographer nor the subject can govern, constitutes the secret kept by the object. Unrelated to the intention of either photographer or subject, within the magic of photography dwells a still, quiet shock. Try to imagine our house one day when we ourselves are no more. Somewhere in that house is the ghost of us, which will pass alone in front of a blind mirror, revealing our own blurred image.

The only genuinely photographic subjects are those which are violated, taken by surprise, discovered or exposed despite themselves, those which should never have been represented because they have neither self-image nor selfconsciousness. The savage - like the savage part of us - has no reflection. He is savagely foreign to himself. The most seductive women are the most selfestranged (Marilyn). Good photography does not represent anything: rather, it captures this non-representability, the otherness of that which is foreign to itself (to desire, to self-consciousness), the radical exoticism of the object. Objects, like primitives, are way ahead of us in the photogenic stakes: they are free a priori of psychology and introspection, and hence retain all their seductive power before the camera. Photography records the state of the world in our absence. The lens explores this absence; and it does so even in bodies and faces laden with emotion, with pathos. Consequently, the best photographs are photographs of beings for which the other does not exist, or no longer exists (primitives, the poor, objects). Only the non-human is photogenic. Only when this precondition is met does a kind of reciprocal wonder come into play - and hence a collusiveness on our part vis-a-vis the world, and a collusiveness on the part of the world with respect to us.

Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors, and we have our images. We believe that we bend the world to our will by means of technology. In fact it is the world that imposes its will upon us with the aid of technology, and the surprise occasioned by this turning of the tables is considerable. You think you are photographing a scene for the pleasure of it, but in fact it is the scene that demands to be photographed, and you are merely part of the decor in the pictorial order it dictates. The subject is no more than the funnel through which things in their irony make their appearance. The image is the ideal medium for the vast self-promotion campaign undertaken by the world and by objects - forcing our imagination into self-effacement, our passions into extraversion, and shattering the mirror which we hold out (hypocritically, moreover) in order to capture them. The miraculous thing about the present period is that appearances, so long reduced to a voluntary servitude, have now become sovereign, and turned back towards (and against) us by means of the very technology from which we had earlier evicted them. Today they come from elsewhere, from their own place, from the heart of their banality, of their objectality: they surge forth on all sides, multiplying of their own accord, and joyfully. (The joy of taking photographs is an objective joy, and anyone who has never felt the objective transports of the image, some morning, in some town or desert, will never understand the pataphysical delicacy of the world.)

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

The art of photography is all about capturing emotions not events.

It doesn't need a photographer to capture the beautiful things in life :)

An image captured on camera represents an individual record seen by the photographer's eye.