Quotes & Sayings About Cartier

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

The combination of a brand like Cartier and the immense heritage that India holds can go places. — Mark Shand

I am inclined to believe that this is the land God gave to Cain. — Jacques Cartier

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

It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don't work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me. — Sebastiao Salgado

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart. — Henri Cartier-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

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

I love both real and fake jewelry. My kids make me necklaces, and I wear those, too. Every day, I wear my gold wedding band and the Cartier watch my husband gave me. — Aerin Lauder

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

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

All brands, whether high-ticket luxury ones such as Cartier or Rolls-Royce or 'masstige' ones with luxe-y overtones but altogether more affordable, all want to grow. Even brands that may have started in a modestly niche design and lifestyle fashion can find themselves under pressure to go global or to sell out at the top. — Peter York

I like to browse in Cartier, Chanel and Gucci and if something special grabs my eye I splash out. — Lisa Snowdon

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

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

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

I love watches. I have a Hublot, a Breitling, and a Cartier. Different accessories that I match together just to be comfortable and casual. — Chandler Parsons

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

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

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

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

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

I'm a big fan of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who had that whole "decisive moment" approach to taking pictures, of having multiple elements line up within the frame. — Nick Zinner

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

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

It looks like Armani and Cartier went to war. — Nora Roberts

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

The Photography is a chopper which in the eternity seizes the moment which dazzled it. — 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

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

A photographer's eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimetre. He can modify perspectives by a slight bending of the knees. By placing the camera closer to or farther from the subject, he draws a detail. But he composes a picture in very nearly the same amount of time it takes to click the shutter, at the speed of a reflex action. — 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

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

He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment. — 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

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

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

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

Scoring a lot of points is not a goal of mine. I just do whatever I do best to help my team win. I'm a role player. — Cartier Martin

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

Unwrapping the paper carefully so it doesn't tear, I find a beautiful red leather box. Cartier. It's familiar, thanks to my second-chance earrings and my watch. Cautiously, I open the box to discover a delicate charm bracelet of silver or platinum or white gold - I don't know, but it's absolutely enchanting. Attached to it are several charms: the Eiffel Tower; a London black cab; a helicopter - Charlie Tango; a glider - the soaring, a catamaran - The Grace; a bed; and an ice cream cone? I look up at him, bemused. "Vanilla?" He shrugs apologetically( ... ) — E.L. James

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hallsy is only thirty-nine, and already her face is pulled tight as a pair of Lululemon yoga pants across a plus-size girl's rear. She's never been married, which she'll tell you she never wants to be even though she hangs all over every remotely fuckable guy after a single drink, while they gently untangle her Marshmallow Man arms from around their stiff necks. It's no wonder the only ring on her finger is the Cartier Trinity, what with the way she's ruined her face and the fact that she spends more time sunning on the beach than she should running on a treadmill. But it's not just her sunspot-speckled chest and stocky, lazy frame. Hallsy is the type of person others describe as "whacky" and "kooky," which is just the civilized way of saying she's a nasty cunt. Hallsy she loves me. — Jessica Knoll

Give me inspiration over information. — 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

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

If the soil were as good as the harbors, it would be a blessing. — Jacques Cartier

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

I don't know nothing about that. I'm not the man upstairs. — Cartier Martin

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

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

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

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

Blue and green should never be seen together, but the person wearing this mix, will be of interest. — Jacques Cartier

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

Of course it's all luck. — 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