Favorite Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

[Ann]

It's seldom a Decisive Moment — it's more a question of Decisive Forethought: you sense a moment is about to unfold and you react accordingly. At least I do — or I try to do.

Modern cameras which can shoot a burst just make it easier to capture the peak of the action than we could with earlier equipment.

As for Processing: I have always considered that the camera work was only the first part of making a photograph and that the photographer had to be mindful at the time he took the shots of the way that film was to be developed and printed.

In the days of Film, I never considered those who did not develop and print their own photographs to be real Photographers — and I still feel that way about people who won't make the effort to learn to use today's wonderful software to complete their vision!

[Matthew Currie]

I'm not convinced that taking more than one shot in a row makes a decisive moment not decisive, or that doing something someone else sort of did reduces a shot to mere imitation.  No doubt HCB was less pure than some would like to think, and perhaps less than he'd like us to think, but I do notice, for example, that of the three pictures shown of people jumping, only one shows a person at the very precise moment he is about to drop into a puddle of unspecified depth.  Some might also consider that there's a difference between what one suspects are models jumping on command and a person caught jumping by necessity.  Whether that makes the image good or not, you can argue, but it does suggest that the image is different.

[ArthurDent]

“Your first ten thousand photographs are your worst.”

[pluton]

I think that if a quiet, small, mechanically powered 9 FPS Leica camera was available in the 1930s, HCB would have used it.

[Hugh_3170]

I bet that he would have Keith.

Rapidly winding film on with those knurled knobs that the old Leicas used to have must have been a right royal pain in the neck!

I think that if a quiet, small, mechanically powered 9 FPS Leica camera was available in the 1930s, HCB would have used it.

[ArthurDent]

I think that if a quiet, small, mechanically powered 9 FPS Leica camera was available in the 1930s, HCB would have used it.

I’d emphasize the “quiet” aspect. He did not want to be noticed while taking photographs, even going so far as to put black tape over the shiny parts of his camera so people wouldn’t notice it.

[ArthurDent]

“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.”- HCB

[Eddie Draaisma]

HCB didn't need a motor-driven camera, he was able to capture the moment invisible with a 24 fps movie camera... 

https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/exposing-of-a-gestapo-informer/

[Ann]

Noct:

HCB's split second response in that Hearing was exactly what I meant by my comment: "It's seldom a Decisive Moment — it's more a question of Decisive Forethought: you sense a moment is about to unfold and you react accordingly.

I am fairly certain that I don't actually "see" the moment but I sense it building and react: if you wait until you actually "see' the peak action, you will react too late.

With human emotions it is fairly easy to sense what is happening and react and a single shot is all that you need.
It is the same with many animal shots: once you have learned by watching them for a while, it becomes quite easy to predict what they are about to do and you can often capture the defining moment in a single shot.

Hummingbirds in flight, and similar fast action happenings, are a different matter; you can't see the wing-positions of a humming bird but a high-speed burst at 1/8000 sec will enable one to choose either wings-down or wings-up after the event.

In my case, I think that any ability that I have to predict and re-act was helped by long years of shooting with medium format film in cameras which had only manual film-advance (and no auto anything!) so you had to catch the moment and get it right with a single shot.

It would probably be a useful exercise to work in single-exposure mode from time to time?

[pluton]

“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.”- HCB

In the mind of the viewer, photographs of people, whether recent or from the deep past, can be morbid, elegaic, or both at the same time.

[Akira]

I think that if a quiet, small, mechanically powered 9 FPS Leica camera was available in the 1930s, HCB would have used it.

Keith, I thought you said "HCB would NOT have used it" and agreed with it.

He would have wanted a camera with an even more responsive shutter release than a Leica, rather than FPS, I guess?

[pluton]

Keith, I thought you said "HCB would NOT have used it" and agreed with it.

He would have wanted a camera with an even more responsive shutter release than a Leica, rather than FPS, I guess?

It's clear that being discreet was of utmost importance to HCB, so any camera that generated any appreciable amount of noise would have been rejected.  I'll modify my idea to '...he would have tried it' instead of 'he would have used it.'