Time & Perspective Quote by Jacques-Henri Lartigue

A moment is already dying as you name it; Lartigue’s line treats photography as the elegant theft of time. “Catching” isn’t neutral craft language. It’s physical, almost childlike - a hand darting out to snag something mid-flight. That choice matters because Lartigue came of age with the camera as a new kind of toy and weapon, fast enough to trap motion the eye barely processes. His world - Belle Epoque leisure, racing cars, airborne hats, bodies in play - wasn’t built for stillness. The photograph becomes proof that the blur was real.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the staged, painterly tradition photography inherited. “Passing” insists on speed and loss; it’s not nostalgia yet, it’s the pre-nostalgia panic that if you don’t seize it now, it’s gone. Then he sharpens the claim with “true,” a word that sounds simple until you notice he doesn’t say “accurate.” Truth here isn’t about perfect exposure or objective record. It’s about lived immediacy: the unrepeatable conjunction of light, gesture, accident, and attention.

That’s the deeper intent: to define authenticity as timing. Lartigue isn’t arguing that cameras never lie; he’s saying the best photographs don’t have time to. When you shoot what’s vanishing, you’re less likely to impose a story and more likely to reveal one. The “true” moment is the one that escapes performance - not because people aren’t acting, but because life moves too fast to keep the mask in place.