I spent the Christmas weekend of 2010 with Henri Cartier-Bresson, watching the few documentaries he made and a few documentaries about him. I've always liked his photographs, who could not? His idea of capturing the decisive moment and his success in that make his black and white photos immediate and living. In one documentary, he is shown photographing a street market in Paris, dancing to capture that instant when something, anything happens. He is thin and dapper in his suit and as graceful as Fred Astaire.
His impatience with being called an artist and his work art resonates with me. For him, the camera is an extension of his eye and the geometry of the image is what makes it work:
"The greatest joy for me is geometry, that means a structure. You can go shooting for shapes or patterns and all this but it's a sensuous pleasure an intellectual pleasure at the same time, to have everything in the right place. It's a recognition of an order which is in front of you." When eye, heart, and mind are aligned in the shot, he has what reveals, what remains. His refusal to use light meters and flashes, his respect for the subjects of his regard is more than admirable; it is necessary for the quality of his work and shines through it.
When I was young, my father gave me my mother's ancient, tiny camera and for a few weeks I shot everything I could and even developed some of the pictures myself. After a little while, I lost interest because I'd gained the ability to see the frame without a viewfinder and thus didn't need the camera to capture the image. The image was in my mind and imagination, after all, and the photograph was only a representation of that, an afterthought after the flash of the glance. Cartier-Bresson, who returned to drawing and painting and put away the camera later in life, would understand I think.
Cartier-Bresson worked as an assistant to the film director Jean Renoir and made two documentaries about the Spanish Civil War. It was strange to see how far away that time is from us now and how near the struggle still is around the world and here at home. He also made a touching documentary after World War II about the repatriation of prisoners of war and displaced persons, a subject he knew well as he had been a POW for 35 months under the Germans, attempting escape twice before finally succeeding on the third try and then working for the Resistance under false papers. One sequence shows the occasion of one of his famous photographs where one woman accuses another of working for the Gestapo. The photograph shows her mouth open and jaw set as she grabs the traitor. The movie shows her accusing the traitor and how quick the movement was that Cartier-Bresson caught. His eye must have been nearly as quick as da Vinci's.
The last two documentaries he made were for CBS News and shown in 1970 and 1971. They are half hour imagistic impressions of California and the American South. It is amazing to think, today, that once a TV network news division would commission such work. These two half hours show more about my country than the hours of talk or self-important blather the punditocracy releases today, a continuous belch of unanchored opinion.
Cartier-Bresson looked and saw, noticed and observed. He caught a little of that on film and brought it back to show us. Never does he embarrass the people he photographs, never does he embarrass us, the people who view them.
These days, I carry a digital camera in my backpack and sometimes go out on shooting walks. I photograph what I photograph for myself and geometry for me, too, is what makes a picture. I learned a lot from Henri Cartier-Bresson in this Christmas present to myself and his memory. Perhaps it will show up in my photographs. Perhaps it will show up in my life.
"There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.”
"Life is once, forever."
Henri Cartier-Bresson: Collector's Edition (DVD)
http://www.arthousefilmsonline.com/...
Photo Gallery of Cartier-Bresson's work at Magnum Photo
http://www.magnumphotos.com/...