Quotes About Photography

You can only take pictures like that if you're able to see ghosts.

photographers at the time often rubbed their fingers with solid lumps of cyanide to remove silver nitrate stains.

I would love to photograph Stephen Hawking. I am just fascinated by science, I really am.

It's that I don't like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room.

I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

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

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

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

We 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.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

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.

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.

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

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.

To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.

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.

We 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. We cannot develop and print a memory.

Photographier : c'est mettre sur la même ligne de mire la tête, l'oeil et le coeur.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to "give a meaning" to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of the mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.

To take photographs is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. To take photographs means to recognize—simultaneously and within a fraction of a second—both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis.

How do you make your pictures? — I don't know, it's not important.

qualunque cosa noi facciamo, kertész l'ha fatto prima.