I've been picking up quite a few photography books from my school's fine arts library - some I'm specifically looking for and some just randomly. I just finished one on Henri Cartier-Bresson (called "Henri Cartier-Bresson" ) by Abrams I think (kind of ambiguous cover - I don't think it was published by a US company).
He apparently wrote hundreds of short notes on his work, and a small collection was included at the back of the book. Since Jim posted a bunch of Ansel Adams quotes, here are my favorites from HCB .
Time runs and flows and only our death can stop it. The photograph is a blade that captures one dazzling instant in eternity.
I have no message to deliver, nothing to prove; you see and you feel, and it's the surprised eye that decides.
It is a question of millimetres, of standing here or there. The difference between a good and a bad photo is very slight. They are tiny differences, very tiny...
Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant tale. It happens very quickly, but there is a whole world inside it.
The photographs that I like are those that you can look at for longer than two minutes, which is a long time. But photos that you can keep looking at again and again? There are few of those, very few.
Taking a portrait is the hardest thing for me. It's like placing a question mark over someone.
My passion has never been for photography in itself, but for the possibility of forgetting oneself and recording in a fraction of a second the emotion evoked by the subject and the beauty of the form - in other words, a geometry created by what is there.
For me photography is to place head, heart and eye along the same line of sight. It is a way of life.
Photography has not changed since it began, except from a technical point of view, which, as far as I am concerned, is not a great issues.
The debate over the status and rank that photography should be given among the fine arts has never bothered me, because the issue of hierarchy has always seemed purely academic to me. I would simply say that every "fixed" moment is eternal and therefore belongs to the past, the present, and the future.
As far as I am concerned, photography is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from any other means of visual expression. It is a way of crying out, of freeing oneself, not of proving or affirming one's own originality. It is a way of life.
I never try to take great photographs. Great photographs are offered to me. You have to be available to catch them, be there, not think too hard, forget yourself, not force it, but use your senses, your intuition, your eye. There's no secret: there's no more to it than that.
Personally, I never think about photography; what occupies me is life.
To really look, you must learn to be a deaf mute.
He apparently wrote hundreds of short notes on his work, and a small collection was included at the back of the book. Since Jim posted a bunch of Ansel Adams quotes, here are my favorites from HCB .
Time runs and flows and only our death can stop it. The photograph is a blade that captures one dazzling instant in eternity.
I have no message to deliver, nothing to prove; you see and you feel, and it's the surprised eye that decides.
It is a question of millimetres, of standing here or there. The difference between a good and a bad photo is very slight. They are tiny differences, very tiny...
Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant tale. It happens very quickly, but there is a whole world inside it.
The photographs that I like are those that you can look at for longer than two minutes, which is a long time. But photos that you can keep looking at again and again? There are few of those, very few.
Taking a portrait is the hardest thing for me. It's like placing a question mark over someone.
My passion has never been for photography in itself, but for the possibility of forgetting oneself and recording in a fraction of a second the emotion evoked by the subject and the beauty of the form - in other words, a geometry created by what is there.
For me photography is to place head, heart and eye along the same line of sight. It is a way of life.
Photography has not changed since it began, except from a technical point of view, which, as far as I am concerned, is not a great issues.
The debate over the status and rank that photography should be given among the fine arts has never bothered me, because the issue of hierarchy has always seemed purely academic to me. I would simply say that every "fixed" moment is eternal and therefore belongs to the past, the present, and the future.
As far as I am concerned, photography is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from any other means of visual expression. It is a way of crying out, of freeing oneself, not of proving or affirming one's own originality. It is a way of life.
I never try to take great photographs. Great photographs are offered to me. You have to be available to catch them, be there, not think too hard, forget yourself, not force it, but use your senses, your intuition, your eye. There's no secret: there's no more to it than that.
Personally, I never think about photography; what occupies me is life.
To really look, you must learn to be a deaf mute.
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