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
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. — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event. — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share Image
The intensive use of photographs by mass media lays ever fresh responsibilities upon the photographer. We have to acknowledge the existence of a chasm between the economic needs of our consumer society and the requirements of those who bear witness to this epoch. This affects us all, particularly the younger generations of photographers. We must take greater care than ever… — 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 Image
What do you think I'm a professor of? The little finger? (On offers of honorary doctorates.) — Henri Cartier-Bresson Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
