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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

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Henri Cartier-Bresson
Age: 95 †
Born: 1908
Born: August 22
Died: 2004
Died: January 1
Film Director
Journalist
Painter
Photographer
Photojournalist
Henri Cartier Bresson
Henri Cartier- Bresson
Henry Cartier-Bresson
Bresson
Moments
Image
Fleeting
Reality
Photography
Precise
Great
Physical
Capture
Intellectual
Faculty
Hold
Breath
Joy
Breaths
Converge
Becomes
Photographer
Mastering
Moment
Photograph
Faculties

More quotes by Henri Cartier-Bresson

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I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my relationship to photography.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Sharpness is a bourgeois concept
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The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.
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I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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In every photographer there is something of a stroller.
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Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
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We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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One eye looks within, the other eye looks without.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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If, in making a portrait, you hope to grasp the interior silence of a willing victim, it's very difficult, but you must somehow position the camera between his shirt and his skin. Whereas with pencil drawing, it is up to the artist to have an interior silence.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Photography appears to be an easy activity in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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It is by great economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks.
Henri Cartier-Bresson