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You have to look, and looking is so difficult. We are used to thinking. We reflect all the time, well or not, but people are not taught how to look. It takes a very long time.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson The Main Thing Is Looking: Interview with Alain Desvergnes (1979)

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More quotes by Henri Cartier-Bresson

The picture-story involves a joint operation of the brain, the eye and the heart.

The Decisive Moment (1952)

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

Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression.

Bruce Elder (1989)

I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes.

Sometimes a single event can be so rich in itself and its facets that it is necessary to move all around it in your search for the solution to the problems it poses — for the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.

The Decisive Moment (1952)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Henri Cartier-Bresson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.