Henri Cartier-Bresson Photography 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.

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.

The intensive use of photographs by mass media lays ever fresh responsibilities upon the photographer. We have to acknowledge the existence of a chasm between the economic needs of our consumer society and the requirements of those who bear witness to this epoch. This affects us all, particularly the younger generations of photographers. We must take greater care than ever not to allow ourselves to be separated from the real world and from humanity.

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).

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact

The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave, I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, 'Damn it', I took my camera and went out into the street.

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

A photographer is part pick-pocket and part tightrope dancer.

Photography is nothing-it's life that interests me.

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.

While we're working, we must be conscious of what we're doing.

Photographier: c'est mettre sur la meme ligne de mire la tete, l'oeil et le coeur.

Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?

This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements.

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

...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.

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

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.

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.

Life is once. Forever.

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

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

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

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

Of course it's all luck.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

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

Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.

One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.