“I started by painting and drawing and for me photography was a means of drawing and that’s all. Immediate sketch done with intuition, and you can’t correct it. If you have to correct it, it’s your next picture. But life is very fluid. Well sometimes the pictures disappeared and there is nothing you can do. You can’t tell the person, oh, please smile again, do that gesture again. Life is once, forever.”
~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
The lovely and generous Trina Koster lent me some photography resources, including The Decisive Moment: Photographs and Words by Henri Cartier-Bresson. It’s a short film made in 1973 with Cartier-Bresson’s still images and his voice over them. I loved it.
I had no idea about C-B’s roots in surrealism, although it makes sense now that I do. I also hadn’t seen his portrait of Ezra Pound (in the asylum, I imagine, although I don’t know) before, and I loved it. It really caught some of the mystery and madness I associate with Pound.
A few more gems from the film*:
“You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt, which is not a very easy thing. And the attitudes of people are so different in front of a camera. Some are embarrassed, some are ashamed, some hate to be photographed and others are showing off. You feel people very quickly. You see people naked through the viewfinder, you see them stripped naked, and it’s sometimes very embarrassing.”
“[With Pound,] I stood in front of him for maybe an hour and a half in utter silence. We were looking at each other in the eyes and I took maybe altogether one good photograph for possible and two which were not interesting. It’s about six pictures in an hour and a half, and no embarrassment whatsoever.”
“Ideas are very dangerous. You must think all the time but when you’re photographing you’re not trying to push a point to explain something, to prove something. You don’t prove anything. It comes by itself.”
“Life changes every minute. The world is being created every minute and the world is falling to pieces every minute. Death is present everywhere, as soon as we are born. It is a very beautiful thing the tragic, le tragique de la vie – what is tragic in life – because there is always two poles and one cannot exist without the other one. It is these tensions I am always moved by.”
“A camera is a weapon. You can’t prove anything but at the same time it is a weapon. [...] It’s a way of shouting the way you feel. I love life, I love human beings, I hate people also. You see, the camera, it can be a machine gun. It can be a psychoanalytical couch. It can be a warm kiss. It can be a sketch book, the camera. And even for me, that’s strictly my way of feeling, I enjoy shooting a picture, being present and it’s a way of saying yes, yes, yes. [...] There is no maybe. All the maybes should go to the trash because it’s very instant, it’s the presence, it’s a moment, its there. [...] Even if it’s something you hate…yes! It’s an affirmation…Yes!”
Speaking of affirmations, here is my son, from last week:

* Any inaccuracies are mine. I started with this source for a transcript, then cleaned up the grammar a bit.