Never boss people around. It's more important to click with people than to click the shutter.
I dream that someday the step between my mind and my finger will no longer be needed. And that simply by blinking my eyes, I shall make pictures. Then, I think, I shall really have become a photographer.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses a vision of effortless creativity where the act of creation becomes instantaneous and intuitive.
Alfred Eisenstaedt's quote reflects the desire for a seamless connection between thought and artistic expression. He envisions a future where the barriers to creating art, such as the distance between inspiration and execution, vanish, enabling a direct transformation of imagination into visual reality. This desire for immediacy in artistic creation highlights the deep passion artists have for their craft and the yearning for a more profound and intrinsic connection to their work.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can inspire artists at a gallery opening to reflect on their creative process.
More from Alfred Eisenstaedt
All quotes →Today's photographers think differently. Many can't see real light anymore. They think only in terms of strobe - sure, it all looks beautiful but it's not really seeing. If you have the eyes to see it, the nuances of light are already there on the subject's face. If your thinking is confined to strobe light sources, your palette becomes very mean - which is the reason I photograph only in available light.
Retire? Retire from What? Life? I will only retire when I am dead!
I always prefer photographing in available light – or Rembrandt-light I like to call it – so you get the natural modulations of the face. It makes a more alive, real, and flattering portrait.
People will never understand the patience a photographer requires to make a great photograph, all they see is the end result. I can stand in front of a leaf with a dew drop, or a rain drop, and stay there for ages just waiting for the right moment. Sure, people think I'm crazy, but who cares? I see more than they do!
Yes, I sold buttons to earn living. But I took pictures to keep on living. Pictures are my life – as necessary as eating or breathing.
Similar quotes
Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)
The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.
For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.
Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.
You want to make money, remake 'Cinderella.' You want to move people, remake the Hippolytus and Phaedra myth.
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.