Henri Cartier-Bresson

From Wikiquote

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

Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3 2004) was a French photographer. He was commonly considered the undisputed master of candid photography using the small-format 35mm rangefinder camera.

[edit] Sourced

For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving
- The Mind's Eye

[edit] Attributed

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.

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.

In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick...Like an animal and a prey.

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

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

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.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression. And this organization, this precision, will always escape you, if you do not appreciate what a picture is, if you do not understand that the composition, the logic, the equilibrium of the surfaces and values are the only ways of giving meaning to all that is continuously appearing and vanishing before our very eyes.

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.

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.