Pierre Poulain - Photographer

Photography, for me is a supreme moment captured with a single shot.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

A photograph draws its beauty from the truth with which it is marked. For this very reason I refuse all the tricks of the trade and professional virtuosity which could make me betray my canon. As soon as I find a subject which interests me, I leave it to the lens to record truthfully.
André Kertesz

I try to photograph people's spirits and thoughts. As to the soul-taking by the photographer, I don't feel I take away, but rather that the sitter and I give to each other. It becomes an act of mutual participation.
Yousuf Karsh

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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

The photographer must be absorbent--like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment.... His technique should be like an animal function...he should act automatically.
Robert Doisneau

Light glorifies everything. It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects. The object is nothing, light is everything.
Leonard Missone

Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph
André Kertesz

I didn't decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.
Berenice Abbott

This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition – an organic coordination of visual elements
Henri Cartier-Bresson

What matter most to me (...) is to take photographs; to continue taking them and not to repeat myslef. To go further, to go as far as I can.
Josef Koudelka

The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.
Robert Doisneau

I have never taken a picture for any other reason than that at that moment it made me happy to do so.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing a meditation.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.
Richard Avedon

Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable.
Berenice Abbott

The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the photographer must act or lose his prize.
Yousuf Karsh

Most of the information we now get is through television and is mutilated. Photography offers the opportunity to spend much more time on a topic. It's relatively cheaper medium, and can allow a photographer really to live in another place, show another reality, get closer to the truth.
Sebastiao Salgado

Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue

I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
Richard Avedon

I don't believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out.
Sebastiao Salgado

If you take a picture of a human that does not make him noble, there is no reason to take this picture. That is my way of seeing things.
Sebastiao Salgado

The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
Berenice Abbott

The picture is not made by the photographer, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.
Sebastiao Salgado

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Richard Avedon

Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.
Yousuf Karsh

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange

Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvellous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop
Ansel Adams

Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.
Peter Adams

If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time
Robert Doisneau

… put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.
Dorothea Lange

In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.
August Sander

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,; what is essential is invisible to the eye
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

It’s not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed
Sebastiao Salgado

While both photographer and painter produce visual images on two-dimensional surfaces, they differ fundamentally in their ways of seeing. In most cases it is the act of painting that absorbs the painter. But this act is highly subjective. His focus is on the canvas itself; his fancy is purely his own. The photographer’s act is to see the outside world precisely, with intelligence as well as sensuous insight. This act of seeing sharpens the eye to an unprecedented acuteness.
Berenice Abbott

I have often been asked what I wanted to prove by my photographs. The answer is, I don’t want to prove anything. They prove to me, and I am the one who gets the lesson
Lisette Model

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus

Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

Perfection is achieved when nothing else can be removed
Yvon Chouinard

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.
Richard Avedon

New images surround us everywhere. They are invisible only because of sterile routine convention and fear.
Lisette Model

Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important
Henri Cartier-Bresson

The moment always dictates in my work. What I feel, I do. This is the most important thing for me. Everybody can look, but they don't necessarily see. I never calculate or consider; I see a situation and I know that it's right, even if I have to go back to get the proper lighting.
André Kertesz

Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
Dorothea Lange

I’ve never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning--but some phase of photographer I’ve always been.
Dorothea Lange