Time & Perspective Quote by Ernst Haas

Haas is pitching photography as a revolution in how culture stores feeling and fact: not an illustration of the world but a piece of the world, portable and replayable. The sly power in “express reality by reality” is its swagger. Painting and writing translate; the photograph, he argues, seems to quote. That confidence fits the mid-century moment he helped shape, when magazines, gallery shows, and later television trained the public to treat the camera as a kind of neutral witness even as photographers were quietly deciding what “reality” would look like.

Calling it a “new language” isn’t just poetic; it’s a claim about literacy and authority. A language creates insiders and outsiders, grammar and fluency. Haas is suggesting the camera doesn’t merely record; it teaches us how to see. The phrase “for the first time” flatters modernity’s favorite myth - that we’ve finally escaped subjectivity - while smuggling in a much more interesting truth: photography’s “reality” is persuasive precisely because it feels unmediated. It’s reality with an accent, shaped by framing, timing, light, and the photographer’s taste.

The most revealing line is the last one, where the supposed objectivity tilts into psychology. “We can look…as long as we wish” describes photography’s real invention: time control. A fleeting impression becomes an object you can interrogate, fetishize, or use as evidence. “Renew past experiences at will” reads like a promise and a warning. Memory, once messy and private, becomes repeatable, shareable, and therefore editable - a technology that can deepen intimacy or trap you in a loop of curated nostalgia.