MOMA and Beyond
With all this personal history long behind me in May, 2010, I traveled to New York City to see a huge retrospective of Cartier-Bresson’s work at the Museum of Modern Art. Although I had ceased being a photographer almost 20 years prior, the chance to see the the master’s work again was irresistible. The show was called “The Modern Century.”
With few exceptions all the prints were the approximately same size, averaging roughly 24 cm x 36 cm (9.5 in x 14 in). [The proportions of Cartier-Bresson photos nearly always follow the proportions of the original exposure (1x1.5), since cropping violated his principle that the golden ratio of the frame markers were the given boundaries of the composition.] Unfortunately, this imposed a crushing sameness, with masterpieces lumped together with the merely reportorial; none of the images were allowed to express their grandeur with large-scale prints.
A second limitation: the tonality of the prints. Granted, Cartier-Bresson shunned the high contrast light and preferred low-contrast prints. But these prints were too often just plain muddy.
Many sections of the exhibit were accompanied by glass-topped cases situated directly beneath the photos hanging on the wall. The cases showed copies of Life Magazine and Paris Match, opened to the articles illustrated by his photographs. This had the advantage of demonstrating how his work appeared as photojournalism. Cartier-Bresson was a witness to history. Seeing these side-by-side, the prints and the pages where they appeared was a lesson in the key role Cartier-Bresson played in the evolution of photojournalism.
After viewing the entire sprawling exhibit I came away with a new perspective on my hero’s work. He was a pioneer but also a journeyman. Sometimes he elevated photojournalism to the level of fine art. Some of his images taken on assignment reached the level of durable art. And I could see the clear influence of his work in mine, sometimes in plain imitation. Take, for instance, his photo of sunbathers taken in 1955 on the banks of the Seine:
With my photo taken in the central park in Budapest in 1976:
As a young aspiring artist it is good to have gods, to venerate works of acknowledged masters and hold them up as ideals to be imitated or emulated. But as an old man, it is not advised to hold the masters to the standards of our youth.
[Start over with Part 1]
]]>Re: The Christian Science Monitor
The fiasco with failing utterly to publish my piece on Pavel Zajicek and The Plastic People and similar experiences convinced me that neither the timeliness of a story, nor the quality of my writing and photography mattered in finding opportunities to publish my journalism. Even when I succeeded the economics were not in my favor. Yet in 1980 I had a streak of good luck with The Christian Science Monitor, one of just a few truly national U.S. newspapers in those days. The foreign news editor ran my story about the “Alice In Wonderland” quality of the Polish economy on the front page. This sudden break came in the immediate wake of Solidarity’s strikes in Gdansk. The Monitor published others of my Polish pieces and for once I was given a forum for my journalism. One day an entire ad-free page was devoted to my writing and photography. It showed the Writer’s Union café, where sat leading dissident Adam Michnik, a key member of Solidarity. I was thrilled to see my work in a major news organ, reporting an important story, illustrated with photos in the manner of Cartier-Bresson. There was a downside: Being an independent journalist I was paid “stringer’s rates” for my work: $400 total for the entire page. That sum did not even pay my travel expenses in doing the piece.
Throughout the years of working mostly in the shadows I remained a devoted acolyte of Henri Cartier-Bresson. I bought every book that featured his work. Inspired by seeing some of his photos printed as big as 30”x45” in a Manhattan gallery, I learned how to print my own giant images, projecting the negative onto oversized sheets of photo paper cut from a 100-foot roll and fastened down on my darkroom floor with the enlarger head raised two meters above. 45-minute exposures were not uncommon.
For a period of years I lived out this ideal: citizen of the world, camera in hand, ever ready for the next opportunity when the prospect of a great image might present itself. I was never without my camera, usually the Leica M-2, always looking out for that great composition.
Even more frustrating than pursuing magazine and newspapers editors was my unsuccessful quest to exhibit in galleries. One big exception was my 1-man exhibit in the gallery of ZPAV, The Union of Polish Art Photographers, in Krakow, Poland. I hung over 100 photos in the expansive gallery. Further, I arranged with the cultural attache in the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw to take the exhibition on the road after its conclusion in Krakow. Two years later the prints were returned to me at home in the U.S. after exhibitions in 6 cities of Poland.
Failing to establish a reputation back home, lacking a sponsor, and steadily loosing money it was inevitable that I would move on. Cartier-Bresson offered me an artistic vision and a model of how to live, but not a way to secure my place in the world of photography. I never lost my love of the master’s work or the ideal he represented. Eventually, years after I stopped actively photographing, I got my London exhibit (Proud Galleries, “Blues Anthology”, 2008-2009), and my show at Panopticon Gallery in Boston (April-May, 2010) in Boston, and an exhibit in the Cambridge office of Google.
[Go on to Part 7, Conclusion]
]]>Cartier-Bresson’s great skill in knowing when to press the shutter was matched by his luck with launching himself in the era of the big picture magazines. Particularly after World War II his photographs appeared in the pages of Life (1948-1963), Paris Match (1949-1962), Saturday Evening Post (1948-1951), and Der Stern (1955-1963), among others. In 1947 he founded Magnum, the premier agency for photojournalists, with Robert Capa, George Rodger, William Vandivert, and David Symore (a.k.a. “Chim”).
My timing was less fortuitous. I began photographing in the twilight of photojournalism of the Magnum sort. [Life Magazine published its last weekly edition in December 29, 1972.] I had only my own resources and my readiness to go out on “self-assignment,” occasionally accompanied with a letter of introduction from a magazine like The Nation or Harper’s Magazine. I became a photojournalist without a journal.
I traveled extensively and usually at my own expense. In 1972 I made a personal study of Israel from its northern-most tip at the Lebanese border, down to Sharm El Sheikh at the very end of the Sinai Peninsula. I visited a Palestinian refugee camp near Nablus in the West Bank. I stayed in an agricultural moshav (collective) on the Golan Heights, following along behind the Israeli cowboys tending their cattle on horseback. And there was the 10,000-mile circuit around North America following the rodeo circuit. From that adventure came an article published in Prague and Moscow with the English title “Hang Loose, Hold Tight.” All with my camera at hand under the banner of Cartier-Bresson.
I found one subject that held a special passion for me: blues music. And among blues musicians one in particular was my constant concern: B.B. King. I met B.B. near the beginning of my photographic career in 1968. We became friends at once, something many people experienced on meeting him. The story of how this friendship became a book is long and winding. In 1980 Doubleday published The Arrival of B.B. King, the Authorized Biography of the Foremost Blues Singer and Guitarist of Our Time. Doubleday was the 53rd publisher on the long list of publishers that received my proposal for such a book. It contains over 100 photos including 80+ of mine. One of my photos became an icon for the B.B. King Museum which opened in Indianola, Mississippi in 2008. The profile of B.B. King, arms outstretched appears on Museum merchandise: t-shirts, caps, coffee mugs, shot glasses, etc.
In 2017 the new Museum of Mississippi History opened in Jackson, MS. This photo appears as a mural on one wall of the main hall, rendered in relief.
[Go on to Part 5]
]]>Re: The Plastic People of the Universe
I did some satisfying photojournalism, combining my photos with the copy I wrote myself, most of which went from editor to editor looking for a home.
One story can serve as a case study to illustrate the obstacles I faced. In 1977 I went to Prague on official assignment for Harper’s Magazine, to cover the plight of dissident writers and artists. An aspect to the story stood apart from the others in my coverage for Harper’ s; that was the ordeal of a group of counter-culture musicians and poets called The Plastik People of the Universe. They worked entirely outside the official organs of the arts. They played concerts without the obligatory permits. Some of their lyrics were the stuff of political protest and the regime decided to make an example of them. Band members and lyricists were put on trial for subversion and sentenced to prison. Friends of mine arranged a meeting for me with chief lyricist Pavel Zajicek, just released from prison. I interviewed him and photographed him at a secret meeting in a Prague pub. The very fact of his meeting with a Western journalist risked his return to prison, and my expulsion from the country.
When I arrived back in New York I phoned The Village Voice, New York’s leading weekly newspaper of art and politics. Would they be interested in an 800-word article on Zajicek and The Plastik People, I asked an assistant editor? Drop it by, was the answer. The next day I delivered the manuscript, written over night in a blaze of enthusiasm for the subject and the opportunity.
I waited a few days and rang up the assistant editor, asking to talk with his boss about my piece. “You don’t get to talk to an editor of The Village Voice just by asking,” he told me. “You need to call and call and call and hope to get lucky and catch him in an odd moment.”
I thought about Zajicek risking a return to prison if his meeting with me was discovered and now a gatekeeper was telling me I had to become a petitioner to the The Village Voice to tell his story in print. My answer was curt: “Tell your boss I’m a journalist with an important story. He has my draft, if he’s interested have him contact me, quickly, because I intend to offer it to other publications.”
In the coming weeks I offered the Zajicek piece to Rolling Stone and The Boston Phoenix. Neither publication was interested in a story about a counter-culture band battling a communist regime in Eastern Europe. My piece never reached print. However, a few years later The Village Voice ran a front-page article on the Plastik People and their struggles. The writer of the article had never visited Prague, never met any of the musicians or lyricists in person. He wrote from the comfort of Vienna.
This told me a few things that contributed to my eventual decision to abandon my ambitions as a photojournalist. First, except for news of general strikes or the election of a pope, the American popular press was not interested in international news. Selling anything on the politics or the arts of countries behind the Iron Curtain was an uphill battle at best. Second, as an outsider in the profession I was invisible, I simply wouldn’t have access to the editors, even if I had an important story ready for copy editing.
[Go on to Part 6]
]]>Cartier-Bresson’s aesthetic was well documented, most fully in the introduction to his magnum opus The Decisive Moment. There he explained that his art consisted of freezing the composition captured in the frame with a precise choice of the moment when the shutter is fired. He gave me the notion that the frame marker is a container, through which streams a steady flux of compositions. There was the composition in the large—the way the lines divided picture plane into separate regions defining the geometry of the image; and there was composition in the small, which was mostly a matter of timing, the way the wind might blow a curtain. The mark of the master, he wrote, is to recognize the exact moment when the composition is realized in its perfection, wholly compatible with the proportions of the frame, which, in the case of the 35-mm camera, are 2:3. The 35-mm aspect ratio is conveniently close to the mystical value known as the golden ratio, represented by an irrational number approximated by 1.6180339887… Cartier-Bresson embraced the aspect ratio of the 35-mm camera as the most aesthetically pleasing of available formats. Cropping a photograph was deemed an act of aesthetic violence.
Thus began my quest to be my own Cartier-Bresson, camera always at hand, alert for any opportunity to catch life on the fly. My first real success came when I saw four boys playing in a springtime stream.
The character of the photographer as artist, personified by Henri Cartier-Bresson, began taking shape in my mind. He is a hunter; his weapon fits snugly in his palm. [Hunting came naturally to me, once a farm-boy. [See Ten Guns: Memories of a Weaponized Childhood] To support the quest for great subjects one needs to become a citizen of the world, something I had yearned for from the time of my first summer traveling in Western Europe during my college days.
There was another side to the aesthetic of Cartier-Bresson that I was determined to appropriate for my own and that is an attitude toward humanity, one that is sympathetic but not clouded by romanticism: the artist must see and portray one’s fellow humans as they truly are, complicated, sometimes small-minded and vain, but capable of greatness and true generosity, all the capable of lapsing into cruelty as easily as charity. I set out to find a philosophy of life to back my portrayal of life as lived by real people.
Cartier-Bresson’s best images are drenched in narrative, sometimes by a hint of a story, other times by a story full-told. Some stories stand for a whole generation and some stories catch a small incident lasting mere seconds. But I knew if I were to follow his example, I would need to learn from the best storytellers. I found three models: Anton Chekhov, George Orwell, and Somerset Maugham. I devoured their works, often in airports and train stations on my way to find new subjects for my camera.
[Go on to Part 4.]
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Growing old seems to be marked by completing journeys, some lasting decades. May, 2010: I completed a journey that began in the fall of 1966 when a friend showed me a small volume of photographs by the French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson. The journey ended when I saw his life’s work displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in May of 2010.
It is hard to convey the effect that little book of Cartier-Bresson photographs had on me that long-ago evening. Indeed, not just for an evening but for decades to come. Some of the photographs made obvious sense, others were evocative but enigmatic, and some were downright mysterious. Why one would photograph Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral pyre was obvious, but why would one photograph a fruit vendor’s display box? Perhaps my friend sought to amplify the effect of the book when he put his Nikon F 35-mm camera in my hand and appointed me still-photographer for an evening of film making.
I set out to discover the magic behind Cartier-Bresson’s working method and to understand why any of his photographs might be a great work of art. I soon encountered several myths about the man and his work.
[Go on to Part 2.]
]]>First was the myth that Cartier-Bresson was “invisible”. He was said to move among his subjects unnoticed. Also, he fiercely protected his anonymity, refusing to have his portrait published. I prowled library stacks, looking in periodicals, hoping to find a likeness of him. Every photo I found of him was either taken from behind or with his camera blocking his face. Once I dreamed I saw him from a distance and ran to look him in the face, but when I got there his face was blank—no features, just a blank.
When Cartier-Bresson began photographing in the 1930’s the 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera with its built-in light meter was a thing of the future. He used a Leica range-finder 35 mm camera. Even when the SLR appeared in the late 1940’s he eschewed this type of camera as being clumsy, conspicuous and noisy. Throughout his life he embraced the ascetic Leica—no light meter, only a rangefinder for focusing. It was the photographer’s job to judge the light and set the exposure by hand; to know the depth of field for the chosen aperture; and to focus. And the film? High speed black and white, e.g. Kodak Tri-X (ASA 400).
In the time (1967-68) when I first became fixated on HC-B my only camera was a Kodak Instamatic. One winter day I looked out the window of the rented farmhouse where I lived and saw the late afternoon light streaming across a cluster of abandoned antique farming machines. The light cast long shadows on a field of virginal snow. I took my Kodak and stepped outside to catch this small miracle.
When my snapshots came back in the mail from Eastman Kodak I knew I had made something special.
“If I had a really good camera I could do even better,” I thought to myself. So, I bought a Nikon F 35mm camera. Soon thereafter, I bought my first Leica, a new M-2, still available in camera shops in spite of the recent introduction of the M-4. The Leica was quiet, compared to the Nikon, having no mirror in the shutter mechanism, just the focal-plane curtains. Shutter speeds faster than 1/30th of a second had a demur, barely audible zip-sound. Cartier-Bresson, I read, covered the shiny metal body of his Leica with black tape to camouflage it, make it less conspicuous. I followed suit, carefully cutting out spaces for the viewfinder on strips of black electric tape.
[Go on to Part 3]
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