The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box. — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share Image
Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile… — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
Rene Char wrote somewhere, apropos poetry, that there are those who create and those who discover; they are too completely different worlds. Photograph also… — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity. — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing. — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
In order to give meaning to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what he frames. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline… — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event. — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
The intensive use of photographs by mass media lays ever fresh responsibilities upon the photographer. We have to acknowledge the existence of a chasm… — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut… — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
What do you think I'm a professor of? The little finger? (On offers of honorary doctorates.) — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
Why do photographers start giving numbers to their prints? It’s absurd. What do you do when the 20th print has been done? Do you… — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its… — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set. — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera. — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff,… — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share
