Henri Cartier-Bresson
A collection of essays by Henri Cartier-Bresson, a French photographer who died just last year and pioneered the field of photography.
A collection of essays by Henri Cartier-Bresson, a French photographer who died just last year and pioneered the field of photography.
In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. 15
I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to “trap” life – to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize, in the confines of one single photograph, the whole essence of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes. 22
A velvet hand, a hawks eye – these we should all have. It’s no good jostling or elbowing. And no photographs taken with the aid of flashlight either, if only out of respect to the actual light – even when there isn’t ant of it. Unless a photographer observes such conditions as these, he may become an intolerably aggressive character. 28
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.
I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds – the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this which we must communicate. 43
The segregation of photography, the ghetto into which this world of specialists has placed it, really shocks me. Photographers, artists, sculptors… You either have a feel for the plastic, or else a conceptual thought. Some people prefer one over the other; that’s not my problem. My problem is to be in mt life. To seize the moment in its fullness. Thought alone doesn’t interest me. Photography is a manual labor: you have to move, to shift… The body and the spirit should add up to one only. An aside: despite the inconvenience, it was useful for a young surrealizing bourgeois, during the three years of his captivity, to do some manual labor – pounding in railroad cross-ties, working in cemeteries and auto factories, washing grub in huge copper cauldrons, making hay. And all the time with one idea in mine: escape. 87