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.

Rene Char wrote somewhere, apropos poetry, that there are those who create and those who discover; they are too completely different worlds. Photograph also has two sides to it and thank goodness, I am only intersted in those who discover; I feel a certain solidarity with those who set out in a spirit of discovery; I think there is much more risk invovled in this than in trying to create images; and in the end, reality is more important.

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.

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

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

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

Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?