Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes about Photography - Page 2

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.

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.

To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.

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.

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

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.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

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.

While we're working, we must be conscious of what we're doing.

I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.

Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.

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.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

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.