Top 100 Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
#4. We 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. We cannot develop and print a memory.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#5. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#9. As photojournalists, we supply information to a world that is overwhelmed with preoccupations and full of people who need the company of images ... We pass judgement on what we see, and this involves an enormous responsibility.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#10. I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There's an elegance, just like in a bullfight.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#11. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#12. I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds - the one inside us and the one outside us.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#13. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#14. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#16. The adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#17. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#18. He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#20. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#21. Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#22. Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#23. What do you think I'm a professor of? The little finger? (On offers of honorary doctorates.)
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#26. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#27. Why do photographers start giving numbers to their prints? It's absurd. What do you do when the 20th print has been done? Do you swallow the negative? Do you shoot yourself? It's the gimmick of money.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#29. We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#31. Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#32. In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#33. The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#36. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#37. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#39. To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#42. I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#43. Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#45. I am a pack of nerves while waiting for the moment, and this feeling grows and grows and grows and then it explodes, it is a physical joy, a dance, space and time united. Yes, yes, yes, yes!
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#46. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#47. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#48. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#49. To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#50. In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#51. Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#54. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#55. Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#56. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#59. And no photographs taken with the aid of flash light, either, if only out of respect for the actual light - even when there isn't any of it.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#60. Everyone has got some preconceptions, but you have to readjust them in front of reality. Reality has the last word.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#61. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#62. What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#63. This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#64. The world is being created every minute, and the world is falling to pieces every minute
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#65. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#67. One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#68. For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#69. 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).
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#70. With the one eye that is closed, one looks within, with the other eye that is open, one looks without.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#71. The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#72. It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#74. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#76. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#77. 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, maybe
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#78. Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#80. In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick ... Like an animal and a prey.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#81. One has to tiptoe lightly and steal up to one's quarry; you don't swish the water when you are fishing.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#82. A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#83. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#84. Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#85. They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#87. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#88. It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera ... they are made with the eye, heart and head.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#89. Photography is like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#90. I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#92. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#93. I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my
relationship to photography.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#94. The Photography is a chopper which in the eternity seizes the moment which dazzled it.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#95. Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#96. Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards - never while actually taking a photograph.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#97. 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#98. For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#99. I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me. There is such intensity in this image, such spontaneity, such joie de vivre, such miraculousness, that even today it still bowls me over.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#100. Pictures should never be posed. They are 'revealed' so must be accepted as they are. Left alone.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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