Time & Perspective Quote by Ben Shahn

Shahn’s line quietly swats away the comforting myth that great photographs are born from great gear. He’s not denying technique; he’s demoting it. “The technical facility” is framed as a prerequisite people love to worship because it’s measurable, purchasable, and teachable. The “eye,” by contrast, is judgment: a sensibility shaped by politics, aesthetics, class, and conscience. For an artist who moved between painting, documentary photography, and social realism, that hierarchy matters. It turns photography from a mechanical craft into an ethical and editorial act.

The tell is how he describes the decisive moment: not as luck, not as reflex, but as “this decision that one makes.” The subtext is responsibility. To “snap” sounds casual, even throwaway, yet Shahn insists the opposite: every click is a choice about what counts as evidence, what deserves attention, and what can be safely ignored. In a century flooded with images-from mass newspapers to wartime documentation-that choice becomes cultural power.

Context sharpens the point. Shahn came up in an era when cameras were increasingly accessible and photography was jockeying for legitimacy as art while also serving institutions (magazines, government agencies, propaganda machines). His emphasis on timing and perception is a defense against both snobbery and naïveté: against the idea that photography is just button-pushing, and against the idea it’s pure truth. The “moment” is constructed, and Shahn wants you to notice the constructor.