Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

I'm always amused by the idea that certain people have about technique, which translate into an immoderate taste for the sharpness of the image. It is a passion for detail, for perfection, or do they hope to get closer to reality with this trompe I'oeil? They are, by the way, as far away from the real issues as other generations of photographers were when they obscured their subject in soft-focus effects.

We must respect the atmosphere which surrounds the human being

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.

For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.

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

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.

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.

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.

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.

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.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact

They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.