Getting close is one thing but having the idea is more to the point.

 

"Legend has it that--- as a nod to Robert Capa's famous assertion that "If your pictures aren't good, you're not close enough" --- Tod Papageorge said, "If your pictures aren't good, you're not reading enough." It sounds like him, but whoever the author is, this gets at the spirit of the thing by placing the locus of achieved meaning in the persistently cultivated mind of the maker of the aesthetic object and, contra Capa, not in the subject mater ( or proximity thereto). "

From Tim Carpenter's book: "To Photograph is to Learn How to Die.  An essay with digressions."