Time & Perspective Quote by Bert Hardy

Hardy’s line lands like a shrug that doubles as a mission statement: the world isn’t something he visits, it’s something he frames. The repetition - “Everywhere I look and most of the time I look” - mimics the restless scan of a street photographer, eyes always sweeping for the moment that will snap into meaning. It also admits obsession. Looking is no longer neutral perception; it’s a reflex trained by the camera, a habit of converting life into potential evidence.

The subtext is slightly unnerving: to “see photographs” is to pre-edit reality. People become silhouettes, gestures, juxtapositions. Weather turns into lighting. A glance becomes a decisive moment before it even happens. Hardy isn’t bragging about technical mastery so much as describing a cognitive rewiring, where the camera’s logic colonizes everyday sight. It’s the photographer’s version of hearing music in everything when you’re a composer - except photography carries an added ethical charge, because it implicates other people. If everything is an image, then everyone is a subject.

Context matters. Hardy built his reputation in mid-century photojournalism, when magazines like Picture Post trained audiences to treat photographs as both storytelling and truth-claims. Saying he “sees photographs” aligns him with that era’s faith in the candid, the ordinary, the socially legible. He’s signaling attentiveness to the small human dramas that unfold in public space - and acknowledging the cost: once you’re always framing, you’re never simply there.