Photographer Quotes by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Of course it's all luck.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

While we're working, we must be conscious of what we're doing.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

A photographer is part pick-pocket and part tightrope dancer.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing...

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Why do photographers start giving numbers to their prints? It’s absurd. What do you do when the 20th print has been done?…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

The difference between a good picture and a mediocre picture is a question of millimeters - small, small differences - but it’s…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. The photographers eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

The intensive use of photographs by mass media lays ever fresh responsibilities upon the photographer. We have to acknowledge the existence of…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Poetry is the essence of everything, and it’s through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

A photographer’s eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

I'm always amused by the idea that certain people have about technique, which translate into an immoderate taste for the sharpness of…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

You just have to live and life will give you pictures.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There’s an elegance, just like in a bullfight.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson