The world is being created every minute, and the world is falling to pieces every minute.
In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.
Everyone has got some preconceptions, but you have to readjust them in front of reality. Reality has the last word.
Of course it’s all luck.
To take photographs means to recognize – simultaneously and within a fraction of a second – both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis.
Life is once. Forever.
Actually, I’m not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I’m not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren’t cooks.
Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn’t go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick.
Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.
Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you.
The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.
Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing.
Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation – everything except a stage set.
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.
What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm – the relationship between shapes and values.
He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.
I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There’s an elegance, just like in a bullfight.
The difference between a good picture and a mediocre picture is a question of millimeters – small, small differences – but it’s essential. I didn’t think there is such a big difference between photographers. Very little difference. But it is that little difference that counts, maybe.
And no photographs taken with the aid of flash light, either, if only out of respect for the actual light – even when there isn’t any of it.
Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.