Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

You just have to live and life will give you pictures.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.

Gabriel Lippmann

The problem of direct colour photography has been facing us since the turn of the last century.

Gabriel Byrne

A completely disrespectful photographer was asked to stop taking photographs, and then said, 'I've got what I want. What are you going to do about it?' How would you feel if somebody walked up and started taking your photograph? I don't think you'd be very happy.

Frank Capra

If the audience gets everything, if they see the photography and notice that it is good, then the story goes out the window, but if you become involved with the lives of the actors and forget that you are seeing mechanical devices on a huge screen - forget the make-believe - this is the job of the director to involve the audience with the actors.

Christopher Anderson

Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that is is just a trick.

Isabel Allende

Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.

Frans Lanting

It's up to us as photographers to give voice to the natural world.

Jerry Uelsmann

The contemporary artist...is not bound to a fully conceived, previsioned end. His mind is kept alert to in-process discovery and a working rapport is established between the artist and his creation. While it may be true, as Nathan Lyons stated, 'The eye and the camera see more than the mind knows,' is it not also conceivable that the mind knows more than the eye and the camera can see?

Jerry Uelsmann

The creative process can sustain itself throughout the entire celebration of photography.

Jerry Uelsmann

I have gradually confused photography and life and as a result of this I believe I am able to work out of myself at an almost precognitive level.

Jerry Uelsmann

Editions made sense when people worked with engravings where the plate wore down as prints were made. An early number of the edition had slightly better quality. But that's not the case with photography. To me, it's a false way of creating value.

Jerry Uelsmann

I'm really very concerned with helping to create an attitude of freedom and daring toward the craft of photography.

Jerry Uelsmann

And young people who are learning digital skills discover that the real challenge is coming up with an image that resonates, first of all, with your self and hopefully, with an audience. They can learn all these new techniques and think that they're easier to use, but creating great images isn't about the tools.

Jerry Uelsmann

I have gradually confused photography with life.

Jerry Uelsmann

My creative process begins when I get out with the camera and interact with the world. A camera is truly a license to explore. There are no uninteresting things. There are just uninterested people.

Jerzy Kosinski

Photography was the first foreign language of my artistic expression.

Jerzy Kosinski

Mapplethorpe presented the body as a sexual object, separating it from the humanity of the person. He added nothing to photography as a medium. I hold his work in low regard.

Jeff Bridges

I found that photography was a great way of relaxing on the set.

Jean Renoir

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

Jean-Luc Godard

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

George Bernard Shaw

I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.

George Bernard Shaw

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous.

George Bernard Shaw

What, or who, led you to take up photography, and about what date ? George Bernard Shaw – I always wanted to draw and paint. I had no literary ambition. I aspired to be a Michelangelo, not a Shakespeare. But I could not draw well enough to satisfy myself; and the instruction I could get was worse than useless. So when dry plates and push buttons came into the market I bought a box camera and began pushing the button. It was in 1898.

George Bernard Shaw

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.