Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They’re quick things and there’s a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.
Pictures should never be posed. They are ‘revealed’ so must be accepted as they are. Left alone.
Photography is like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust.
In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.
There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.
One has to tiptoe lightly and steal up to one’s quarry; you don’t swish the water when you are fishing.
Photographier: c’est mettre sur la meme ligne de mire la tete, l’oeil et le coeur.
Photography is nothing-it’s life that interests me.
Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.
Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one’s general culture. one’s set of values, one’s clarity of mind one’s vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life.
There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.
During the work, you have to be sure that you haven’t left any holes, that you’ve captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.
As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It’s a trace.
For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.
We cannot develop and print a memory.
Why do photographers start giving numbers to their prints? It’s absurd. What do you do when the 20th print has been done? Do you swallow the negative? Do you shoot yourself? It’s the gimmick of money.
A photographer is part pick-pocket and part tightrope dancer.
Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing...
In every photographer there is something of a stroller.
The Photography is a chopper which in the eternity seizes the moment which dazzled it.
I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life.