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-BressonRead
They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the idea that the process of creation can be mysterious and not always articulable.
Henri Cartier-Bresson's quote expresses the perplexity experienced by artists when asked about their creative process. He suggests that rather than focusing on the method of creating art, the importance lies in the art itself and the emotions it evokes. This embodies the notion that creativity is often an instinctive and ineffable experience, rather than a scientific formula that can be easily explained.
Themes
ArtCreationProcessMysteryEmotion
In practice
Example use cases
In an art class, when discussing artistic intuition.
More from Henri Cartier-Bresson
All quotes →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.
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Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.
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Photographier: c'est mettre sur la meme ligne de mire la tete, l'oeil et le coeur.
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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.
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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).
Henri Cartier-BressonRead
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