Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

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.

I think each shoot has a different personality.

Life rarely presents fully finished photographs. An image evolves, often from a single strand of visual interest - a distant horizon, a moment of light, a held expression.

Sometimes I'm amazed by how much you can do as a photographer.

You’ve gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.

Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.

I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs. Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he 'uncovers' it.

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time.

Photographers want to reinvent you, to take you somewhere else, to show you in a completely different way. They look at your previous work, and try to figure out what they can do to show a new side of you.

For me photography has been a profession, an avocation. Now it has become a way of life.

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

You don't take a picture, you make a picture.

To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!

If you see a theme that you might want to take a photo of, you sort of stand there for an hour waiting for it to resolve, waiting for the geometry of a theme to be exactly what you want them to be. That was my process to get photos.

My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things.

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

My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of facts; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades.

People go, 'What do you want to do?' What do you want to do? What are you feeling? Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do—that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

Many photographers are consumed with the idea of making beautiful contact sheets. I am far more interested in making the best final print I can.

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.