Top 100 Bresson's Quotes
#1. Weston's sensual texture or Cartier-Bresson's implacable composition are apt to close over themselves, attaining the perfection of a certain sensual and harmonious bliss. We see textures, volumes, equilibrium - and reality, open and ragged, is lost and transcended.
Edmundo Desnoes
#2. I do believe in [Robert] Bresson's method of creation through omission, not through addition.
Abbas Kiarostami
#3. 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
#4. The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.
Robert Bresson
#5. One recognizes the true by its efficacy, by its power.
Robert Bresson
#7. Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc ... ) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create
Robert Bresson
#8. Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca.
Patti Smith
#9. The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself.
Robert Bresson
#10. Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence.
Robert Bresson
#11. I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.
Mary Ellen Mark
#12. Lilith Bresson, innocent of everything except having a bastard for a father, took her new fate with a calm that was terrifying.
Tabitha McGowan
#14. Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.
Robert Bresson
#15. The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.
Robert Bresson
#16. Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.
Joel Sternfeld
#17. The greater the success, the closer it verges on failure.
Robert Bresson
#18. Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are.
Robert Bresson
#19. To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#20. The true is inimitable, the false untransformable.
Robert Bresson
#21. In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same kind of people?
Burton Silverman
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.
Robert Bresson
#27. 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
#29. Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that's impossible.
Robert Bresson
#30. I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my
relationship to photography.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.
Robert Bresson
#36. 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
#38. 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
#40. 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
#41. In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#43. To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#44. When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
Susan Sontag
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.
William Eggleston
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. In the NUDE, all that is not beautiful is obscene.
Robert Bresson
#52. I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There's an elegance, just like in a bullfight.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#54. I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures.
David Hockney
#55. He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#56. 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
#57. The adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#59. 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
#60. The tricky bit was figuring out where we were because I couldn't imagine anyone, God included, daring to send Lilith Bresson to hell.
Tabitha McGowan
#61. A film is born in my head and I kill it on paper. It is brought back to life by the actors and then killed in the camera. It is then resurrected into a third and final life in the editing room where the dismembered pieces are assembled into their finished form.
Robert Bresson
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#66. When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best
that is inspiration.
Robert Bresson
#67. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. I do not understand what makes me take a picture. Cartier-Bresson talks about the decisive moment, the necessity to function with lynx eyes and silk gloves. Perhaps what happens when you press the shutter is an intuitive act infused with all you have learned.
Graciela Iturbide
#77. 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
#78. Rid myself of the accumulated errors and untruths. Get to know my resources, make sure of them.
Robert Bresson
#79. 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
#80. In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#81. Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.
Robert Bresson
#82. My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
Robert Bresson
#83. 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
#85. 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
#88. The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries who will shoot films by putting their last penny into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade.
Robert Bresson
#90. 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
#93. When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.
Robert Bresson
#94. What do you think I'm a professor of? The little finger? (On offers of honorary doctorates.)
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#95. Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#96. Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again
it never would have been the same. Start stealing!
Imogen Cunningham
#97. Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#98. To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.
Robert Bresson
#99. The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows.
Robert Bresson
#100. 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
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