Eudora Welty
[Writer, b. 1909, Jackson, Mississippi, d. 2001, Jackson.]
I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer’s truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.
They taught me. The subjects taught me, and my response is what I photographed.
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.
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
I’m not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don’t mean that they are related arts, because they’re not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It’s about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.
[William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.