Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

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

Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.

Photographier: c'est mettre sur la meme ligne de mire la tete, l'oeil et le coeur.

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.

Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing).

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, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.

Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one's general culture. one's set of values, one's clarity of mind one's vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life.

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

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

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

For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.

A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.

Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?

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

There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.

...it is seldom indeed that a composition which was poor when the picture was taken can be improved by reshaping it in the dark room.

Poetry is the essence of everything, and it’s through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often I see photographers cultivating the strangeness or awkwardness of a scene, thinking it is poetry. No. Poetry is two elements which are suddenly conflict — a spark between two elements. But it’s given very seldom, and you can’t look for it. It’s like if you look for inspiration. No, it just comes by enriching yourself and living.

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.

Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.