Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotations

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

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.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

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.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

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.

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.

Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.

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

One eye looks within, the other eye looks without.

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

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

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.

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.

Of course it's all luck.

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

He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.

Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.

Your fitsy 10,000 photographs are your worst.

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.

I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.

Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you.

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

Life is once. Forever.

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

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

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

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.

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. 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. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

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

...it is seldom indeed that a composition which was poor when the picture was taken can be improved by reshaping it in the dark room.

And no photographs taken with the aid of flash light, either, if only out of respect for the actual light - even when there isn't any of it.

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.

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

Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.

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.

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.

Give me inspiration over information.

Rene Char wrote somewhere, apropos poetry, that there are those who create and those who discover; they are too completely different worlds. Photograph also has two sides to it and thank goodness, I am only intersted in those who discover; I feel a certain solidarity with those who set out in a spirit of discovery; I think there is much more risk invovled in this than in trying to create images; and in the end, reality is more important.

As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life.

It seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there's nothing left of truth.

Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

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.

I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.

For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.

Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.

Poetry is the essence of everything, and it’s through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often I see photographers cultivating the strangeness or awkwardness of a scene, thinking it is poetry. No. Poetry is two elements which are suddenly conflict — a spark between two elements. But it’s given very seldom, and you can’t look for it. It’s like if you look for inspiration. No, it just comes by enriching yourself and living.

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

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

I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me. There is such intensity in this image, such spontaneity, such joie de vivre, such miraculousness, that even today it still bowls me over.

I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my relationship to photography.

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.

It's wonderful to be famous as long as you remain unknown.

There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.

Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.

With the one eye that is closed, one looks within, with the other eye that is open, one looks without.

In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick...Like an animal and a prey.

One has to tiptoe lightly and steal up to one's quarry; you don't swish the water when you are fishing.

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

The Photography is a chopper which in the eternity seizes the moment which dazzled it.

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.

They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.

There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.

Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one's general culture. one's set of values, one's clarity of mind one's vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life.

We must respect the atmosphere which surrounds the human being

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

Pictures should never be posed. They are 'revealed' so must be accepted as they are. Left alone.

I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes.

Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.

Culture shock is often felt sharply at the borders between countries, but sometimes it doesn't hit fully until you've been in a place for a long time.

The adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world.

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

I am a pack of nerves while waiting for the moment, and this feeling grows and grows and grows and then it explodes, it is a physical joy, a dance, space and time united. Yes, yes, yes, yes!

In photography, the smallest thing can become a big subject, an insignificant human detail can become a leitmotiv. We see and we make seen as a witness to the world around us; the event, in its natural activity, generates an organic rhythm of forms.

Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards - never while actually taking a photograph.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

Time runs and flows and only our death succeeds in catching up with it. Photography is a blade which, in eternity, impales the dazzling moment.

What do you think I'm a professor of? The little finger? (On offers of honorary doctorates.)

It is by great economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing...

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.