Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

I know some photographs that are extraodrinary in their power and conviction, but it is difficult in photography to overcome the superficial power or subject; the concept and statement must be quite convincing in themselves to win over a dramatic and compelling subject situation.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

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.

Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.

I've been doing photography in one form or another for, oh golly, over seventy years. I don't carry cameras. I used to. For many years I carried cameras wherever I went. Photograph whatever I saw that was of interest. In the last years, I've only used cameras to explore thematic ideas which presented themselves first. And then bring out the cameras to try to explore that idea.

Photography is the product of complete alienation.

There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels...

As for a picture, if it isn't worth a thousand words, the hell with it.

I do not want [photography] explained to me in terms of... formulas, learned, but so hopelessly unsatisfying. I do not want my butterfly stuck on a pin and put in a glass case. I want to see the sunlight on its wings as it flits from flower to flower and I don't care a rap what its Latin name may be.

I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.

No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.

Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs.

Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.

Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )

All photography is Pop, and all photographers are crazy... they feel guilty since they don't have to do very much - just push a button.

The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.

I want my pictures to cut through political abstractions... and make a connection on a human level.