Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
With the one eye that is closed, one looks within, with the other eye that is open, one looks without.
One has to tiptoe lightly and steal up to one's quarry; you don't swish the water when you are fishing.
For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.
The adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world.
They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.
What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.
One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.
Everyone has got some preconceptions, but you have to readjust them in front of reality. Reality has the last word.
It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.
Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.
Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.
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.
All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.
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.
I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my relationship to photography.
I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.
The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.
...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.
And no photographs taken with the aid of flashlight either, if only out of respect of the actual light—even when there isn't any of it.
Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.
Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.
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?
During the work, you have to be sure that you haven't left any holes, that you've captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.
Time runs and flows and only our death succeeds in catching up with it. Photography is a blade which, in eternity, impales the dazzling moment.
Culture shock is often felt sharply at the borders between countries, but sometimes it doesn't hit fully until you've been in a place for a long time.
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.
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.
Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.
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.
Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact
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.
Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.
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.
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 seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there's nothing left of truth.
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.
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.
Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn't go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick.
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.
I am a pack of nerves while waiting for the moment, and this feeling grows and grows and grows and then it explodes, it is a physical joy, a dance, space and time united. Yes, yes, yes, yes!
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.
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.
As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.
As photojournalists, we supply information to a world that is overwhelmed with preoccupations and full of people who need the company of images....We pass judgement on what we see, and this involves an enormous responsibility.