Capturing a Moment Quotes

The image of a bedsheet ghost standing all alone in an empty house was something I was obsessed with. I really wanted to make a film about that image, and I was waiting for the right story to come along. When it did, I did my best to honor that image.

When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

You always want to come back with an image that's interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that's different than other images you know of these people.

I learned from Van Morrison and BB King that the first take is the best. It's about capturing a moment. It's the same as love's first kiss. If you try to do it again, it doesn't work so well.

In 1979, I moved to England and photographed Joy Division and Bowie and Beefheart. At that time I got images that I felt had that special, well - power is a big word to say - more like intimacy and ambition that outlasted the photo shoot. I felt that they would have a longer life.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude.

It used to take me a really long time, and I used to not be able to write in the studio because I felt there was a lot of pressure to be perfect. The more I'm collaborating with other artists, the more I realize being in the studio is about catching a vibe.

I'm not trying to write a perfect record. I'm just trying to nail a moment in time.

When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across.

Portraiture keeps me humble. It's simple and straightforward. There is nothing more interesting I can make up than the figure sitting right in front of me.

I've always felt music is the only way to give an instantaneous moment the feel of slow motion. To romanticise it and glorify it and give it a soundtrack and a rhythm.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

What I love to do is paint people's faces, y'know, their eyes. Because you want to find that emotion, see what's going on behind their eyes.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

There was a village watercolour society and they'd come and paint in my field. I watched them from the window, the way they would struggle this way and that to find the perfect moment. God has made every angle on that beautiful, and I felt that tremendously.

I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time.

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

It's hard for me to assess what I brought because each time you pick up a camera and point it at a person, you're trying to define that person so to talk generally is difficult because I have to think of a given image in order to conjure up what we're talking about.

For me the most important thing to do in a selfie is to have an opinion and to say something with the picture. Don't just take a picture of yourself like, 'Here I am.' It's what are you thinking? Are you happy? Are you angry? Do you like it? Do you not like it? Think an emotion and apply it to your eyes.

Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.

I was absolutely lost in love and life when I did my drawings. Time stood still.

With 'HUMBLE.,' I knew that beat was going to capture a moment. It just felt real urgent.

No, every album is something like a snapshot. It only shows one moment in time. It shows what we feel and think right at that point in time, nothing more and nothing less.

I start listening to something, or I'm seeing somebody a lot or seeing their art. And then I just really want to make a picture of them.