Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

I'm no snapshot artist. I make very careful choices always, even if I'm using a 35mm camera.

It's just about going out and getting the shot, so I have a great understanding of how to execute it, so that really helps me, and also having a good understanding of all the action that I'm shooting, it helps me in determining how I'm going to capture it.

Sometimes photographing people is like pulling teeth, trying to get some sort of personality.

I photograph different people all the time. I like to shoot all kinds of people.

I'm just interested in what makes a photograph.

You always want to come back with an image that's interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that's different than other images you know of these people.

Actually, when I first started dabbling in photography, I was still working for my parents as a salesman.

I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.

It's hard for me to assess what I brought because each time you pick up a camera and point it at a person, you're trying to define that person so to talk generally is difficult because I have to think of a given image in order to conjure up what we're talking about.

The great photographers of life - like Diane Arbus and Walker Evans and Robert Frank - all must have had some special quality: a personality of nurturing and non-judgment that frees the subjects to reveal their most intimate reality. It really is what makes a great photographer, every bit as much as understanding composition and lighting.

My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.

Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.

If your pictures are not good enough, it’s because you are not close enough.

It is a serious job being a portrait photographer, which is how I saw myself.

Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

The portrait of a person is one of the most difficult things to do. It means you must almost bring the presence of that person photographed to other people in such a way that they don't have to know that person personally, but that they are still confronted with a human being that they won't forget. That's a portrait.

We can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.

I do not like bad photographs. I don't like to be badly lit. There is a fashion, particularly on stage, for very 'toppy' lighting, which makes a child look 50. Ten o'clock is very good. If someone is taking a picture, you say, 'Lamps at 10 o'clock,' then everybody looks lovely.

Capturing a beautiful moment in a photo is something I'm very passionate about.

In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.

Photography, for me, is something I can control fully. It's wholly my own expressions.

I have to experiment with methods and I'm trying to find an authentic way of making an equivalent of the living, breathing person within the limits of a single picture.

I like photographers. You don't ask questions.

I would like to become a better photographer. I'm working on that.