A Quote by Joel Sternfeld

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

Joel Sternfeld

Quote Topics

Burned Cartier Due Even Him Photographs Respect

Quote Author

Joel Sternfeld
American - Photographer
Born: June 30, 1944

Some of the people who are now manipulating photos, such as Andreas Gursky, make the argument - rightly - that the 'straight' photographs of the 1940s and 50s were no such thing. Ansell Adams would slap a red filter on his lens, then spend three days burning and dodging in the dark room, making his prints. That's a manipulation. Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

Joel Sternfeld

In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same kind of people?

Burton Silverman

I'm a big fan of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who had that whole "decisive moment" approach to taking pictures, of having multiple elements line up within the frame.

Nick Zinner

And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.

William Eggleston

The decisive moment, the popular Henri Cartier-Bresson approach to photography in which a scene is stopped and depicted at a certain point of high visual drama, is now possible to achieve at any time. One's photographs, years later, may be retroactively rephotographed by repositioning the photographer or the subject of the photograph, or by adding elements that were never there before but now are made to exist concurrently in a newly elastic sense of space and time.

Fred Ritchin

I'm a huge, huge fan of photography. I have a small photography collection. As soon as I started to make some money, I bought my very first photograph: an Henri Cartier-Bresson. Then I bought a Robert Frank.

Annie Leibovitz

Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again --- it never would have been the same. Start stealing!

Imogen Cunningham

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

Susan Sontag

I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures.

David Hockney

I do not understand what makes me take a picture. Cartier-Bresson talks about the decisive moment, the necessity to function with lynx eyes and silk gloves. Perhaps what happens when you press the shutter is an intuitive act infused with all you have learned.

Graciela Iturbide

Weston's sensual texture or Cartier-Bresson's implacable composition are apt to close over themselves, attaining the perfection of a certain sensual and harmonious bliss. We see textures, volumes, equilibrium - and reality, open and ragged, is lost and transcended.

Edmundo Desnoes

The personality and style of a photographer usually limits the type of subject with which he deals best. For example Cartier-Bresson is very interested in people and in travel; these things plus his precise feeling for geometrical relationships determine the type of pictures he takes best. What is of value is that a particular photographer sees the subject differently. A good picture must be a completely individual expression which intrigues the viewer and forces him to think.

Alexey Brodovitch

Let's assume that all the cassettes of monochrome film Cartier-Bresson ever exposed had somehow been surreptitiously loaded with colour film. I'd venture to say that about two thirds of his pictures would be ruined and the remainder unaffected, neither spoiled nor improved. And perhaps one in a thousand enhanced.

Philip Jones Griffiths

The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony.

Paul Goodman

I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.