Henri Cartier-Bresson
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
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.
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.
Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event. 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.
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.
It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.Collection: Photography
One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.Collection: Photography
Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.Collection: Photography
You just have to live and life will give you pictures.Collection: Photography
There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.Collection: Doe
Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.Collection: Photography
Sharpness is a bourgeois conceptCollection: Photography
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.Collection: Photography
Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.Collection: Photography
In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.Collection: Photography
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.Collection: Inspirational
Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you.Collection: Photograph
I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.Collection: Eternity
Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.Collection: Photography
For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.Collection: Photography
Human faces are such a world!Collection: Humanity
To take photographs is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axisCollection: Heart
Life is once. Forever.Collection: Photography
Photography is nothing-it's life that interests me.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Photography
Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Photography
Photography is like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust.Collection: Photography
It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.Collection: World
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).Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Inspiration
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.Collection: Photography
For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.Collection: Attitude
Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Kissing
Photographier: c'est mettre sur la meme ligne de mire la tete, l'oeil et le coeur.Collection: Photography
Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.Collection: Photography
Of course it's all luck.Collection: Photography
They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.Collection: Photography