Time & Perspective Quote by Sam Abell

Abell isn’t praising photography as the “best” art so much as naming its most seductive trick: it flatters our fantasy that time can be negotiated with. “Alone of the arts” is a provocative overreach on purpose. Painting can freeze a scene, music can loop a feeling, film can replay an event. But photography arrives with a built-in alibi of reality: this happened, light touched this surface, the world held still long enough to be verified. The medium’s authority doesn’t come from imagination; it comes from evidence.

The line “for a moment - this very moment - to stay” is doing emotional work through repetition and urgency. Abell tightens the noose from the abstract (“a moment”) to the specific (“this very moment”), mirroring the shutter’s snap: a narrowing of time until it becomes a slice you can own. That’s the subtext: we don’t just want to remember; we want to possess. Photography doesn’t merely document the passing of life, it offers a ritual of control in the face of loss.

Context matters because Abell is a photographer known for patient, composed work rather than frenetic capture. He’s speaking from inside the craft’s paradox: the camera preserves while also proving impermanence. Every “saved” moment announces everything just outside the frame that couldn’t be saved. In an era of infinite phone photos, the quote reads less like celebration than warning: the more we try to make moments stay, the more we admit how quickly they leave.