Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes - Page 2

Of course it's all luck.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.

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).

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.

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

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

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.

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.

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

The world is being created every minute, and the world is falling to pieces every minute

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

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

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.

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

One eye looks within, the other eye looks without.

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

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

We cannot develop and print a memory.

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.