“The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream.”

— Ansel Adams

Radio interview, 1972

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Ansel Adams 29

American photographer and environmentalist 1902–1984

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

“I would want a dreaming machine that dreams up the most beautiful dreams and then show me exactly how to make them a reality…This is the eternal conundrum: the visualization of desires (dreams), and then the dissonance between that and reality.”

Sally Wen Mao Chinese-born American poet

On her poem “Yume-Miru Kikai” in “41.2 Feature: An Interview with Sally Wen Mao” https://bwr.ua.edu/an-interview-with-poet-sally-wen-mao-from-issue-41-2/ in Black Warrior Review (2015 Mar 2)

“To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers

“Taking a photograph is, it seems to me, a momentary revelation of an instance of the universal unity. The subject and I are one.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: Beyond the Obvious: Photography for Healing (2014), p. 77

“Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can re-capture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty!”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 7
Context: Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can re-capture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties; so Mole, after struggling with his memory for a brief space, shook his head sadly and followed the Rat.