Henri Cartier Bresson Quotes

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.

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

Photographier : c'est mettre sur la même ligne de mire la tête, l'oeil et le coeur.

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.

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.

— How do you make your pictures? — I don’t know, it’s not important.

Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should? ­

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.

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to "give a meaning" to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of the mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.

If there is one point, it's humanity, it's life, the richness of life. The thing is simply to be sensitive.

For me photography is to place head and heart and eye along the same line of sight. It’s a way of life.

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.

qualunque cosa noi facciamo, kertész l’ha fatto prima.

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.

Vos 10 000 premières photographies seront les pires.

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.

En la vida como en la fotografía, hay que pasar los negativos a positivos

he never stopped taking photographs, only now it isn’t with a camera but mentally.

Für mich besteht die Photographie im gleichzeitigen blitzschnellen Erkennen der inneren Bedeutung der Tatsache einerseits, und auf der anderen Seite des strengen und rückhaltlosen Aufbaus der optisch erfaßbaren Formenwelt, die jede Tatsache zum Ausdruck bringt. Indem wir leben, entdecken wir uns selbst und gleichzeitig die Außenwelt, die auf uns einwirkt, auf die wir aber auch unsererseits einwirken können. Zwischen dieser inneren und äußeren Welt muß ein Gleichgewicht geschaffen werden, die beiden Welten bilden in einem immerwährenden Dialog ein einziges Ganzes, und den Begriff davon müssen wir mitzuteilen suchen.

I was once present at a lecture that Eugene Smith gave to some students at a school of photography. At the end, they protested because he had made no mention of photography, but had spoken the whole time about music. He calmed them by saying that what was valid for one was valid for another. —Henri Cartier-Bresson

Enjoy a drink at the Hôtel Scribe (6; 1 rue Scribe), where Cartier-Bresson feted the liberation of Paris

Tus primeras 10.000 fotos serán tus peores fotos.

Henri Cartier-Bresson's approach exemplifies this interest in the autonomy of modernist photographs. Cartier-Bresson took many of his photographs as a professional photojournalist, reporting on conditions and events around the world in multi-image picture-stories. Yet he regularly republished single images from these stories in anthologies with little or no captioning, elevating them in the process from a context of journalism to art.

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.

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment.

Chim picked up his camera the way a doctor takes his stethoscope out of his bag, applying his diagnosis to the condition of the heart. His own was vulnerable.

Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?

And she said it in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook”—which has obvious appeal as a how-to primer for any aspiring writer who likes to eavesdrop but which also delivers an unexpected meditation on identity and place. I was in the right place until it was the wrong place, she says of herself. Or to me: There is nothing wrong with you; you are just in the wrong place. This idea that there is a right place and time for each of us, and you can vacate it by mistake and return to it only at great expense, fills much of her work with a kind of anticipatory nostalgia—looking backward even as she projects into the future. It’s an example of what Shakespeare called the “preposterous,” which as his scholars love to point out literally describes a condition where “before” follows “after” or “pre” follows “post”—a state of chronological, and often psychological, confusion. Remember the scene in “On Keeping a Notebook” when Didion sees a blonde in a Pucci bathing suit at the Beverly Hills Hotel surrounded by fat men? The blonde does the one thing that a blonde in a Pucci bathing suit was born to do: she “arches one foot and dips it into the pool.”2 There, she’s in her element. Right time, right place. It has a cinematic or photographic quality, like Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment.

To take photographs,” wrote Henri Cartier-Bresson, “is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. . . . It is putting one’s head, one’s eyes and one’s heart on the same axis. . . . It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s originality. It is a way of life.” These words of the renowned French photographer define photography as an ongoing meditative relationship to the world. For Cartier-Bresson, photography is not merely a profession but a liberating engagement with life itself, the camera not just a machine for recording images but “an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”1 To be moved to take photographs, like being inspired to practice meditation, is to embark on a path. In both cases you follow an intuitive hunch rather than a carefully considered decisioṇ Something about “photography” or “meditation” draws you irresistibly. While you may initially justify your interest in these pursuits with clear and compelling reasons, the further you proceed along their respective paths, the less you need to explain yourself. The very act of taking a photograph or sitting in meditation is sufficient justification in itself. The notion of an end result to be attained at some point in the future is replaced by an understanding of how

We establish a calm abiding center, not to fortify ourselves against the chaos of life, but to help us become resilient, tolerant, and accepting of the inevitable, perplexing, and often agonizing losses we all go through. A calm abiding center and a fully engaged life, therefore, go hand in hand. This inner tempering through the fire of practice allows us to live at higher and higher levels of charge: to feel intensely, love intensely, and work intensely without fracturing in the process. We make firm this abiding center of equanimity, but not to sequester ourselves from life or to make life less “lively.” Rather, as the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said about capturing life through the lens of his camera, we “discipline reality.” Cartier-Bresson did not lessen the poignancy of his subject matter through being attentive to it. In the same way, when we practice Yoga we do not dampen the fiery nature of life: if anything, we place ourselves right in the fierce heat of the center.

You have to try and stay alive in front of what you see, struggle with reality, get rid of habits and routines. You have to train yourself to look all the time, swinging between the conscious and the unconscious. In a sort of dance, I practice immediate, automatic, and intuitive drawing. I get a Normas joy from it. But the flaunting of reportage—getting into situations, “working” a subject—that is not photography.

But he was so very sad about the boy who didn’t see. Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky. How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again. The albums on my mother’s shelves are full of family photographs. But also other things. A starling with a crooked beak. A day of hoarfrost and smoke. A cherry tree thick with blossom. Thunderclouds, lightning strikes, comets and eclipses: celestial events terrifying in their blind distances but reassuring you, too, that the world is for ever, though you are only a blink in its course. Henri Cartier-Bresson called the taking of a good photograph a decisive moment. ‘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,’ he said. ‘The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone for ever.