Henri Cartier-Bresson
The world is being created every minute, and the world is falling to pieces every minuteCollection: Fall
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.Collection: Photography
Everyone has got some preconceptions, but you have to readjust them in front of reality. Reality has the last word.Collection: Reality
A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.Collection: Photography
One eye looks within, the other eye looks without.Collection: Eye
We cannot develop and print a memory.Collection: Memories
What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.Collection: Photography
It's wonderful to be famous as long as you remain unknown.Collection: Long
It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.Collection: Photography
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, maybeCollection: Thinking
In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.Collection: Art
The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.Collection: Photography
Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Photography
He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.Collection: Photography
Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Country
To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.Collection: Photography
In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick...Like an animal and a prey.Collection: Photography
The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.Collection: Photography
It is by great economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.Collection: Mean
Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible.Collection: Variation
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Photography
While we're working, we must be conscious of what we're doing.Collection: Photography
I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.Collection: Photography
And no photographs taken with the aid of flashlight either, if only out of respect of the actual light—even when there isn't any of it.Collection: Photography
All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.Collection: Photography
Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.Collection: 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.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Photography
Pictures should never be posed. They are 'revealed' so must be accepted as they are. Left alone.Collection: Photography
...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.Collection: Photography
Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Photography
I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There’s an elegance, just like in a bullfight.Collection: Photographer
We must respect the atmosphere which surrounds the human beingCollection: Atmosphere
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.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Photography
With the one eye that is closed, one looks within, with the other eye that is open, one looks without.Collection: Eye
Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. The photographers eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimeter. 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 — and it can be subordinated, or he can be tyrannized by it.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Photography
I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes.Collection: Eye