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Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you.

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
Nobody
Takes
Take
Photographs
Photograph

More quotes by Henri Cartier-Bresson

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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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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-Bresson
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Why do photographers start giving numbers to their prints? It’s absurd. What do you do when the 20th print has been done? Do you swallow the negative? Do you shoot yourself? It’s the gimmick of money.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Of course it's all luck.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible.
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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Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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In order to give meaning to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what he frames. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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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-Bresson
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Sharpness is a bourgeois concept
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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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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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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In every photographer there is something of a stroller.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave, I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, 'Damn it', I took my camera and went out into the street.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me. There is such intensity in this image, such spontaneity, such joie de vivre, such miraculousness, that even today it still bowls me over.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
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It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.
Henri Cartier-Bresson