I prefer my hesitations, my false paths, my stammering, to a preconceived idea.
If I knew how to take a good photograph, I’d do it every time.
The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.
A photographer who made a picture from a splendid moment, an accidental pose of someone or a beautiful scenery, is the finder of a treasure.
If you take photos, don’t speak, don’t write, don’t analyze yourself, and don’t answer any questions.
A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there-even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.
Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly.
Chance is the one thing you can’t buy. You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time.
Photography is very subjective. Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie.
You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it’s virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn’t that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.
For a photographer, the first 70 years are a bit difficult, but after that things get better.
I don’t usually give out advice or recipes, but you must let the person looking at the photograph go some of the way to finishing it. You should offer them a seed that will grow and open up their minds.
Nowadays people’s visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.
I hate collectors, the ones who take something just for themselves.
To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.
When people talk to me about picture hunters, I very quietly laugh. I’m not a hunter of pictures, I’m a fisher of pictures.
If you stay right where you are, then people will eventually come to you.
To those who enjoy breathing the smell of incense, I recommend a different profession. The photographer pulls the sleeve of the rushed man with a blank stare and shows him the free and permanent show of the street.