Robert Doisneau Quotes

#1. If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

Robert Doisneau

#2. For a photographer, the first 70 years are a bit difficult, but after that things get better.

Robert Doisneau

#3. You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it's virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn't that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.

Robert Doisneau

#4. There are days when simply seeing feels like happiness itself ... You feel so rich, the elation seems almost excessive and you want to share it

Robert Doisneau

#5. I don't usually give out advice or recipes, but you must let the person looking at the photograph go some of the way to finishing it. You should offer them a seed that will grow and open up their minds.

Robert Doisneau

#6. If you take photos, don't speak, don't write, don't analyze yourself, and don't answer any questions.

Robert Doisneau

#7. I hate collectors, the ones who take something just for themselves.

Robert Doisneau

#8. Photography is very subjective. Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie.

Robert Doisneau

#9. When people talk to me about picture hunters, I very quietly laugh. I'm not a hunter of pictures, I'm a fisher of pictures.

Robert Doisneau

#10. To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.

Robert Doisneau

#11. The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.

Robert Doisneau

#12. Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.

Robert Doisneau

#13. I prefer my hesitations, my false paths, my stammering, to a preconceived idea.

Robert Doisneau

#14. Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly.

Robert Doisneau

#15. A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there - even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

Robert Doisneau

#16. A photographer who made a picture from a splendid moment, an accidental pose of someone or a beautiful scenery, is the finder of a treasure.

Robert Doisneau

#17. To freeze time, to hold on to youth, this business makes no sense.
It's always time that wins in the end.

Robert Doisneau

#18. I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be,

Robert Doisneau

#19. The photographer must be absorbent - like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment ... His technique should be like an animal function ... he should act automatically.

Robert Doisneau

#20. Chance is the one thing you can't buy. You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time.

Robert Doisneau