Cartier-Bresson and Me: Part 3
Cartier-Bresson and Me: Part 3
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.]
