How Do You See the World?
Pool, puddles and jumping. Here’s one of my favourite family photos. Looking at it again ten years later, I find myself on a thought journey about photography and creativity.
Photo courtesy of James Chaytor, 2013
He raises the camera to his eye and in that moment all the chaos of the scene before him, the splashing of water, the screams of delight, the blue of the pool and the colourful swimwear coalesce into the photographic frame in a split second.
There were many pictures before this one, of our two daughters running into the pool trying to walk on water with an inflatable ring circling their waists. I can almost hear the quiet before she hits the water and the squeals of laughter begin again.
The Puddle Jumper
If you know anything about photography (and even if you don't) you will know (hopefully) this famous photograph by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Here a man steps magically into the air, elevated as if running above the water, his reflection in perfect symmetry with himself. A fraction of a second later, his foot will break the surface of the puddle bringing his body and reflection together before the reflection dissolves and the figure runs out of frame.
If you look carefully towards the back of the photograph, on the poster in the distance, someone else mirrors the jump heading the opposite way.
Derriere la Gare Saint Lazare (Behind Saint Lazare train station) 1932 - The Daily Mail
Images à la Sauvette
This sends me down a rabbit hole of my own making where I'm reminded how much I loved the photography of Cartier-Bresson when I first picked up a camera. His classic book of photographs published in 1952, The Decisive Moment, is one which any street photographer, amateur or professional, will point to. Except the phrase the decisive moment was not Cartier-Bresson’s choice. This title is not even a direct translation from the French. The original title is Images à la Sauvette - Images On the Run.
In the US, the publishers, Simon & Schuster decided that Images on the Run wasn't a marketable title. The phrase 'the decisive moment' was lifted from Cartier-Bresson's opening text and regarded as far better for advertising the book in North America.
As often happens when I read about these sorts of things, I'm left pondering these two expressions; Images on the Run and The Decisive Moment. On the face of it, they could be regarded as one and the same. Cartier-Bresson didn’t think so and neither do others. The photographer Michael Rubin writes an interesting article about what Cartier-Bresson actually meant by the decisive moment and how the expression has been taken out of context.
So what did he mean? The phrase ‘images on the run’ suggests the photographer moving through space and time capturing and stealing brief moments 'like a thief' as Cartier-Bresson himself describes. In that moment of space and time, all the rhythms, lines of composition, the pose of a person and a flash of expression all come together, within the frame of the photographic edge.
The decisive moment suggests something else more certain and definite as if the photographer can predict exactly what will happen in any scene before him. As if there is only one way to photograph.
“Cartier-Bresson found the expression ‘the decisive moment’ much too limiting because he was also very interested in psychoanalysis and the subconscious...
...It’s not just any photographer who thinks like that, so this notion of the ‘decisive moment’ obscures all that. It’s very precise, very literal. It doesn’t take into account all the different temporalities of photography, of the subconscious, of the past, of the day before.”
Cartier-Bresson hated that the term had taken on an almost mythical status in the photographic world, specifically attached to him and all his photography work.
We would never describe ourselves or others in a couple of words or phrases. It would be immensely hard. If you think of anyone you know, there will be many stories you have of them. We are all a multitude of life experiences, memories, things we learn, moral values, upbringing and philosophies. These are all the things we bring to our creative work.
Cartier-Bresson was a painter before he became a photographer. He brought all that learning about painting from composition to light and shadow into his unique way of taking photographs. His life experience will have influenced the subject matter he photographed. Perhaps what he disliked most was the idea of the decisive moment editing a life's work into an insignificant fraction of time.
My husband, taking the photograph of our daughter above, will have delighted in the visual elements before him, he’s a designer after all. He will have seen the curved line of the swimming pool, the bright colours and the highly graphic composition. But he is also a dad, there on holiday with his family attempting to capture, in photographs, the joy of this day. I’m not trying to suggest that my husband’s photograph is as great as Cartier-Bresson’s puddle jumper. Although honestly, I think it is! What I’m trying to explain, I think, is that we never create artistic work out of nothing, as if it comes from nowhere and is magically placed before us.
Your One Theme
I'm writing a book, at the moment, I jokingly call it The Great Canadian Novel. It isn't, of course. I barely even have a title. It’s taken me about a year to write a first draft which, by following the Book Architecture Method, I've pulled apart scene by scene, looking for what the story is about, trying to figure out 'the one theme'. The author, Stuart Horwitz, is clear. Your book can only have one theme.
Try not to confuse this with thinking your story should be a one-liner with no depth. What Horwitz means is that everything about the story you've written, the characters, the scenes, the places and the setting all relate to your one theme. This gives your story direction and purpose.
Like a collection of stars settling around a planet, everything you have experienced and learnt has found its place in a system where you can build your story. Some elements are closer than others, drawn in by the strength of their relationship to the theme.
The theme of my story could not have developed without me writing all those other elements. I’m sensing your curiosity. What is the theme of my story? Intolerance to difference. And that's all I can tell you right now - until the next draft.
Ways of Seeing the World
There's a famous quote by French-born American photographer Elliot Erwitt:
“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place…. I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
Maybe this is what makes some photographs great and others, so many others, just a little bit lacking. The practice of photography, learning to take better photographs, is about bringing two things together - how you see the world in line with how you want to express that creatively. And that creative form isn’t limited to just photography. How you see the world could be expressed in a photograph, a painting, a book, a dance and so on.
Maybe this is why art and creativity are so important to us. Because, at its heart, art isn't just about one intellectual concept after another, although that can be interesting in and of itself. Art expression is how you can take all that you know up to this point and express it in a way that others might understand, be emotionally moved by and find themselves connected to. It's the way one person with a different way of seeing the world can show you something else, something you never knew before.
Cariter-Bresson went back to painting in his later years. It could be said he went full circle right back to the beginning of his self-expression.
“When he decided to stop at the end of the 1960s, Henri Cartier-Bresson would say, “I’ve had enough of the pavement, I want to draw, I want to live in another temporality.”
Cartier-Bresson felt he still had things to learn about how he saw the world. Photography, for him, was only part of his learning. Perhaps he thought that he could learn and express something else about the world through painting that he could no longer do through photography. Who knows.
It's how you see the world that matters. How do you see yours?
