Bresson Quotes & Sayings

It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

When I was just starting out, I met Cartier-Bresson. He wasn't young in age but, in his mind, he was the youngest person I'd ever met. He told me it was necessary to trust my instincts, be inside my work, and set aside my ego. In the end, my photography turned out very different to his, but I believe we were coming from the same place. — Sebastiao Salgado

The true is inimitable, the false untransformable. — Robert Bresson

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

I do believe in [Robert] Bresson's method of creation through omission, not through addition. — Abbas Kiarostami

Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

In a portrait, I'm looking for the silence in somebody. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

It is by great economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Your fitsy 10,000 photographs are your worst. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so. — Robert Bresson

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a 'decisive moment', that's true except that it shouldn't be taken too narrowly ... does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That's a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it. — Paul Strand

For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows. — Robert Bresson

Cinema, radio, television, and magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen without hearing. — Robert Bresson

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

In every photographer there is something of a stroller. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Empty the pond to get the fish. — Robert Bresson

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese. — Susan Sontag

Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the unforeseen. — Robert Bresson

Be the first to see what you see as you see it. — Robert Bresson

Ten properties of an object, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness. — Robert Bresson

When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best
that is inspiration. — Robert Bresson

Let's assume that all the cassettes of monochrome film Cartier-Bresson ever exposed had somehow been surreptitiously loaded with colour film. I'd venture to say that about two thirds of his pictures would be ruined and the remainder unaffected, neither spoiled nor improved. And perhaps one in a thousand enhanced. — Philip Jones Griffiths

While we're working, we must be conscious of what we're doing. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

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

Everyone has got some preconceptions, but you have to readjust them in front of reality. Reality has the last word. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept — Henri Cartier-Bresson

It's wonderful to be famous as long as you remain unknown. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle. — Robert Bresson

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory. The writer has time to reflect. He can accept and reject, accept again; and before committing his thoughts to paper he is able to tie the several relevant elements together. There is also a period when his brain "forgets," and his subconscious works on classifying his thoughts. But for photographers, what has gone is gone forever. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There's an elegance, just like in a bullfight. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

All I care about these days is painting - photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

I go back to many films that I really love. Some Bresson, some Godard of the early times, the Cassavetes of those years I love. And the early Wim Wenders. But my own films I don't watch, unless I need them. — Agnes Varda

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

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

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

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. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

We must respect the atmosphere which surrounds the human being — Henri Cartier-Bresson

A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

With the one eye that is closed, one looks within, with the other eye that is open, one looks without. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

A photographer is part pick-pocket and part tightrope dancer. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged. — Joel Sternfeld

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

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

One eye looks within, the other eye looks without. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

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

I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman. — Andrei Tarkovsky

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

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine. — Robert Bresson

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

The personality and style of a photographer usually limits the type of subject with which he deals best. For example Cartier-Bresson is very interested in people and in travel; these things plus his precise feeling for geometrical relationships determine the type of pictures he takes best. What is of value is that a particular photographer sees the subject differently. A good picture must be a completely individual expression which intrigues the viewer and forces him to think. — Alexey Brodovitch

The things one can express with the hand, with the head, with the shoulders! ... How many useless and encumbering words then disappear! What economy! — Robert Bresson

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

To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

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

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

Create expectations to fulfil them. — Robert Bresson

The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself. — Robert Bresson

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

Give me inspiration over information. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Just as Freud couldn't always be blamed for the Freudians, Bresson didn't always feel obliged to behave like a Bressonian. — Jonathan Rosenbaum

For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real. — Robert Bresson

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

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

The ear is profound, whereas the eye is frivolous, too easily satisfied. The ear is active, imaginative, whereas the eye is passive. When you hear a noise at night, instantly you imagine its cause. The sound of a train whistle conjures up the whole station. The eye can perceive only what is presented to it. — Robert Bresson

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

While photography to Cartier-Bresson is constantly an intuitive process, it is never purely instinctive. It is founded on continuous intellection, on ceaseless consideration during all moments previous to, or preparatory for, the pressing. It does not only operate in the blinding flash of a moment seized; it works all the time. The snatched picture merely cuts across the vein of observable incident or accident which is always beating, whether or not the fingers actually press. — Lincoln Kirstein

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

Of course it's all luck. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Unbalance so as to re-balance. — Robert Bresson

Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that's impossible. — Robert Bresson

Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence. — Robert Bresson

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

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

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

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

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

It was from him, and from this picture in particular, that Henri Cartier-Bresson had developed the ideal of the decisive moment. Photography seemed to me, as I stood there in the white gallery with its rows of pictures and its press of murmuring spectators, an uncanny art like no other. One moment, in all of history, was captured, but the moments before and after it disappeared into the onrush of time; only that selected moment itself was privileged, saved, for no other reason than its having been picked out by the camera's eye. — Teju Cole

I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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