Nikki S. Lee
[Photographer, b. 1970, Kye-Chang, Korea, lives in New York.]
I don’t want to carry big things around with me. I’m lazy. The snapshot camera, you just carry it around and take the picture. You don’t need to think about anything. People in the street are not going to wait for you with a big camera. They would freak out. With a snapshot camera, they are comfortable.
Tod Papageorge
[Photographer, b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]
It’s unarguable to say that every one of us has been moved by the beauty of what I have called snapshots, but for photographers they are charms and proverbs, and like lightening or wild strawberries...
Lee Friedlander
[Photographer, b. 1934, Aberdeen, Washington, lives in New York.]
I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and seventy-eight trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography.
Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
[In embracing snapshots,] the attributes previously sought by photographers—strong design, orderly composition, control over tonal values, lucidity of content, good print quality—have been stood on their heads, and the qualities now courted are formlessness, rawness, clutter, accident, and other manifestations of the camera’s formidable capacity for imposing disorder on reality...
(1976)
Eudora Welty
[Writer, b. 1909, Jackson, Mississippi, d. 2001, Jackson.]
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Pictures should look like they were easily taken.
William Klein
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, lives in Paris.]
Sometimes, I’d take shots without aiming, just to see what happened. I’d rush into crowds—bang! bang! ... It must be close to what a fighter feels after jabbing and circling and getting hit, when suddenly there’s an opening, and bang! Right on the button. It’s a fantastic feeling.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
[Anthropologist, b. 1908, Brussels, Belgium, d. 2009, Paris.]
[Photography] remains servile to a “thoughtless” vision of the world… As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.
