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.

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.

We cannot develop and print a memory.

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.

A photographer’s eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimetre. He can modify perspectives by a slight bending of the knees. By placing the camera closer to or farther from the subject, he draws a detail. But he composes a picture in very nearly the same amount of time it takes to click the shutter, at the speed of a reflex action.

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

Human faces are such a world!

In order to give meaning to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what he frames. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.

Why do photographers start giving numbers to their prints? It’s absurd. What do you do when the 20th print has been done? Do you swallow the negative? Do you shoot yourself? It’s the gimmick of money.

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

In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.

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.

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.

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.

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing...

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

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

We must respect the atmosphere which surrounds the human being

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Give me inspiration over information.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Life is once. Forever.

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

Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you.

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

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

Your fitsy 10,000 photographs are your worst.