Bresson Photography Quotes & Sayings

It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos. — 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

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values. — Henri Cartier-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

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

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

And no photographs taken with the aid of flash light, either, if only out of respect for the actual light - even when there isn't any of it. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick ... Like an animal and a prey. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave, I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, 'Damn it', I took my camera and went out into the street. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing. — Henri Cartier-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

It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

- How do you make your pictures?
- I don't know, it's not important. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements. — 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

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

In the history of photography, we have many masterpieces in terms of black and white books. You have Bresson's 'Decisive Moment,' Frank's 'The Americans' ... many masterpieces. But there is nothing to this caliber in color. Well, I think I'll waltz with my muse and hope that I might be able to produce something on this order in color. — Ralph Gibson

I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me. There is such intensity in this image, such spontaneity, such joie de vivre, such miraculousness, that even today it still bowls me over. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is nothing-it's life that interests me. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The intensive use of photographs by mass media lays ever fresh responsibilities upon the photographer. We have to acknowledge the existence of a chasm between the economic needs of our consumer society and the requirements of those who bear witness to this epoch. This affects us all, particularly the younger generations of photographers. We must take greater care than ever not to allow ourselves to be separated from the real world and from humanity. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my
relationship to photography. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Pictures should never be posed. They are 'revealed' so must be accepted as they are. Left alone. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

I'm a huge, huge fan of photography. I have a small photography collection. As soon as I started to make some money, I bought my very first photograph: an Henri Cartier-Bresson. Then I bought a Robert Frank. — Annie Leibovitz

Life is once. Forever. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

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. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

You just have to live and life will give you pictures. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

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

Photography is like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The decisive moment, the popular Henri Cartier-Bresson approach to photography in which a scene is stopped and depicted at a certain point of high visual drama, is now possible to achieve at any time. One's photographs, years later, may be retroactively rephotographed by repositioning the photographer or the subject of the photograph, or by adding elements that were never there before but now are made to exist concurrently in a newly elastic sense of space and time. — Fred Ritchin

To take photographs is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept — Henri Cartier-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

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

Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. — 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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

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

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

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

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera ... they are made with the eye, heart and head. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Photography is a chopper which in the eternity seizes the moment which dazzled it. — Henri Cartier-Bresson