Time & Perspective Quote by Jerzy Kosinski

Kosinski’s boast sounds like a simple claim of documentary purity, but it’s really a sleight of hand about power. “It is apparent” makes objectivity feel self-evident, as if the photograph itself testifies in court. The line flatters the medium’s old alibi: the camera doesn’t lie. Yet the key move is in the timing he fetishizes: “at the moment I released the shutter.” That’s not innocence; that’s control. He isn’t denying authorship, he’s relocating it to a split-second where his agency becomes invisible and therefore harder to question.

As a novelist, Kosinski knew the value of seeming unmediated. His fiction trafficked in heightened “authenticity” and the suspicion that authenticity is often staged. Here, he’s claiming a kind of aesthetic pickpocketing: to catch someone before they perform themselves, to steal a self they didn’t consent to present. The subtext is predatory and modern: the best image is the one taken before the subject can manage their brand.

The quote also prefigures today’s obsession with “candid” culture. We praise unposed photos as more real while forgetting that the act of photographing is already an intervention. No posing doesn’t mean no performance; it can mean the photographer has simply chosen the performance for you. Kosinski’s sentence, with its cool, declarative confidence, exposes how “naturalness” often functions as a style choice - and how style can masquerade as truth.