The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.
A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.
The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
If, in making a portrait, you hope to grasp the interior silence of a willing victim, it’s very difficult, but you must somehow position the camera between his shirt and his skin. Whereas with pencil drawing, it is up to the artist to have an interior silence.
The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.
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.
It seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there’s nothing left of truth.
Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.
To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.
Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.
Give me inspiration over information.
Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible.
All I care about these days is painting – photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.
For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.
One eye looks within, the other eye looks without.
I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me. There is such intensity in this image, such spontaneity, such joie de vivre, such miraculousness, that even today it still bowls me over.
Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
It’s wonderful to be famous as long as you remain unknown.
Only a fraction of the camera’s possibilities interests me – the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.
Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.