“When you use a camera, your visual concentration is intense, as it is when you draw. But if you overshoot, your contact sheet is likely to become a jumble of peelings. You need a lot of sand to discover a nugget. Shooting is a play between pickpocketing and tightrope walking; an endless play, fraught with huge tension.”

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, An Endless Play: Interview with Gilles Mora (1986), p. 102

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "When you use a camera, your visual concentration is intense, as it is when you draw. But if you overshoot, your contact…" by Henri Cartier-Bresson?
Henri Cartier-Bresson photo
Henri Cartier-Bresson 33
French photographer 1908–2004

Related quotes

Tom Waits photo
Theodore Roosevelt photo

“When you play, play hard; when you work, don't play at all.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
Robert Rauschenberg photo
Richard Belzer photo
Count Basie photo

“It's the way you play that makes it. What I say is, for Christ's sake, you don't have to kill yourself to sing. Play like you play. Play like you think, and then you got it, if you're going to get it. And whatever you get, that's you, so that's your story.”

Count Basie (1904–1984) American jazz musician, bandleader, and composer

Good Morning Blues : The Autobiography of Count Basie (1985) by Count Basie and Albert Murray

Václav Havel photo

“If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Address to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London quoted in The Independent, London (24 March 1990)

“… how do you run and play when you feel like there are bricks of the heaviest sadness weighing down every part of your body? How do you laugh and talk when there are no laughs left inside of you?”

Katherine Hannigan (1962) American artist and novelist

Source: Ida B. . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World

Nikos Kazantzakis photo

“In this lightning moment when you walk the earth, your first duty, by enlarging your ego, is to live through the endless march, both visible and invisible, of your own being.”

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: It is not you talking, but innumerable ancestors talking with your mouth. It is not you who desire, but innumerable generations of descendants longing with your heart.
Your dead do not lie in the ground. They have become birds, trees, air. You sit under their shade, you are nourished by their flesh, you inhale their breathing. They have become ideas and passions, they determine your will and your actions.
Future generations do not move far from you in an uncertain time. They live, desire, and act in your loins and your heart.
In this lightning moment when you walk the earth, your first duty, by enlarging your ego, is to live through the endless march, both visible and invisible, of your own being.

Related topics