I hate looking at photography books or illustrated magazines. This is not because of contempt. I’d rather look at contact sheets: that is where you can sense the individual.
Sometimes a single event can be so rich in itself and its facets that it is necessary to move all around it in your search for the solution to the problems it poses — for the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.
If there is one point, it's humanity, it's life, the richness of life. The thing is simply to be sensitive.
How do you make your pictures?
— I don’t know, it’s not important.
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?
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.
The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
Photographier : c'est mettre sur la même ligne de mire la tête, l'oeil et le coeur.
Vos 10 000 premières photographies seront les pires.
The picture-story involves a joint operation of the brain, the eye and the heart.
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.
Sharpness is a bourgeois concept
Photography is solitary work. There is emulation. It is interesting to know what other people do. Even so, writers do not read everything that is published. A painter does not look at everything. You have to choose. It’s reality, it’s life that is important. We shouldn’t be sniffing around each other all the time, looking….
