Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

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

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.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

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

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.