Mr. Gab was a stickler. His ideal was the perfect picture taken on the wing with one shot, and allowed to emerge from its development like a chick its egg, so that one saw not just the subject supremely rendered but a testimony to the unerring fineness of the photographer’s eye; an eye unlike the painter’s, he claimed, because the painter constructed; the painter made up his image as if the canvas were a face; while the photographer sought his composition like a hunter his prey, and took it away clean, when it was found, to present in its purity, as the result of an act of vision, the sort of seeing no one else employed, what Mr. Gab called “slingshot sight.” Painting took too long, sculpture of course was worse, and encouraged thinking, permitted alterations, endured changes of mind; whereas the photographer came, saw, and shot in a Rolleiflex action, in one unified gesture like waving off a fly.

William H. Gass, “In Camera,” Eyes: Novellas and Stories (2015)