Time & Perspective Quote by Alfred Eisenstaedt

Eisenstaedt is quietly rebuking the idea that photography is a mechanical act of capture. When he says we are "only beginning to learn what to say", he treats the camera less like a net and more like a language still being invented. The verb "say" matters: photographs don’t merely show; they argue, flirt, accuse, console. His point is not that the world is photogenic, but that meaning is up for grabs, and the photographer has to choose, in real time, what becomes legible.

The line about "fleeting moments" is where the philosophy sharpens into a craft note. He’s describing a modern condition: life experienced in fragments, speed, and distraction. Out of that chaos, any single instant "might" carry significance, but only if someone recognizes it. That "might" is doing a lot of work; it’s a refusal of sentimentality. Not every moment is profound. The photographer’s job is to find the charged second when gesture, light, and context lock into something that reads as human and true.

Coming from a Life magazine giant who made his reputation on candid immediacy (and the mythos of being in the right place at the right time), the quote also functions as a defense of photojournalism as interpretation, not surveillance. It’s an ethic: pay attention, then edit the flood. In an image-saturated culture, his warning lands even harder - we’re still learning what we’re saying, even when we think we’re just recording.