Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.
One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.
For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.
It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.
Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.
Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.
To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.
To take photographs is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis
Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn't go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick.
It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.
The world is being created every minute, and the world is falling to pieces every minute
A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.
Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event.
He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.
The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.
Photography is like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust.
To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.
I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There’s an elegance, just like in a bullfight.
Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.
The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.
During the work, you have to be sure that you haven't left any holes, that you've captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.
A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.
The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.
Everyone has got some preconceptions, but you have to readjust them in front of reality. Reality has the last word.
What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.
I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life.
Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks.
We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.
Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.
The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.