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.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

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.

Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

You just have to live and life will give you pictures.

As photojournalists, we supply information to a world that is overwhelmed with preoccupations and full of people who need the company of images....We pass judgement on what we see, and this involves an enormous responsibility.

To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.

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.

I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.

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.

As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.

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.

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression. And this organization, this precision, will always escape you, if you do not appreciate what a picture is, if you do not understand that the composition, the logic, the equilibrium of the surfaces and values are the only ways of giving meaning to all that is continuously appearing and vanishing before our very eyes.

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.

To take photographs is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis

Of course it's all luck.

It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

I'm always amused by the idea that certain people have about technique, which translate into an immoderate taste for the sharpness of the image. It is a passion for detail, for perfection, or do they hope to get closer to reality with this trompe I'oeil? They are, by the way, as far away from the real issues as other generations of photographers were when they obscured their subject in soft-focus effects.

In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.

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

Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event.

Life is once. Forever.

A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.

Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing).

The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression... In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

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.

The difference between a good picture and a mediocre picture is a question of millimeters - small, small differences - but it’s essential. I didn’t think there is such a big difference between photographers. Very little difference. But it is that little difference that counts, maybe

One eye looks within, the other eye looks without.

Photography is like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust.

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.

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.

To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.

If, in making a portrait, you hope to grasp the interior silence of a willing victim, it's very difficult, but you must somehow position the camera between his shirt and his skin. Whereas with pencil drawing, it is up to the artist to have an interior silence.

I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There’s an elegance, just like in a bullfight.

Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing.

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.

Everyone has got some preconceptions, but you have to readjust them in front of reality. Reality has the last word.