W.H. Auden
[Poet and writer, b. 1907, York, North Yorkshire, England, d. 1973, Vienna, Austria.]
The only decent photographs are scientific ones and amateur snapshots, only you want a lot of the latter to make an effect. A single still is never very interesting by itself.
(1937) 
Nancy Foote
[Writer and Critic, lives in America.]
Despite its dependence on photography, however, conceptual art exhibits little photographic self-consciousness, setting itself apart from so-called serious photography by a snapshot-like amateurism and nonchalance that would raise the hackles of any earnest professional.
Eudora Welty
[Writer, b. 1909, Jackson, Mississippi, d. 2001, Jackson.]
Insight doesn’t happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but from within.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
The camera is in some ways a sketchbook drawn in time and space, and it is also an admirable instrument that seizes life just as it presents itself.
Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]
I do not mean to attack anything at all. The most seemingly banal pictures are on the contrary the richest... A snapshot, when one conforms to it, becomes an extremely powerful factor... the family photo, with everyone well portrayed in the center of the image, is literally overflowing with life.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
[Photographer, b. 1898, Dirschau, West Prussia (now Tczew, Poland), d. 1995, New York.]
[I was following the sailor] running along the street grabbing any and every girl in sight. Whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, didn’t make any difference. None of the pictures that were possible pleased me. Then, suddenly in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse.
(On his Times Square photo taken in V-J Day.)
Rudolf Arnheim
[Writer and psychologist, b. 1904, Berlin, Germany, d. 2007, Ann Arbor, Michigan.]
When the thing observed... is seen as an agglomeration of pieces, the details lose their meaning and the whole becomes unrecognizable. This is often true of snapshots in which no pattern of salient shapes organizes the mass of vague and complex nuances.
Terry Richardson
[Photographer, b. 1965, New York, lives in New York.]
At the beginning, people laughed at me because I was using snappies. Sometimes, a celebrity would look at my camera and go, “Oh, I’ve got one of those.” I'd feel like handing it to them and saying, “Well, you take the pictures then.” But I like using snapshot cameras because they’re idiot-proof. I have bad eyesight, and I’m no good at focusing big cameras.
