Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes about Photography

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

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

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

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

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

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

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

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.

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

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

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

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

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.

Life is once. Forever.

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.

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

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

Of course it's all luck.

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.

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).