Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
30 quotes • Photographer • Age 95
"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."
"For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity."
"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."
"To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart."
"It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us."
"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."
"The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality."
"Sharpness is a bourgeois concept"
"For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving."
"In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv."
"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."
"Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact"