FRANK
HORVAT talks about Henri Cartier-Bresson:
My
first experience with Henri Cartier-Bresson
is something I probably have in common with
a few hundred other photographers: he looked
at my prints upside down, without paying
attention to subject matter, just making
remarks such as: "see, here you have
a circle, here a triangle: they don't fit".
I didn't really understand what he meant,
and I must admit that even now, fifty years
later, I don't look at photographs that
way. Still, in my life as a photographer,
this meeting was the turning point: because
it conveyed to me the feeling that photography
was a much higher calling than I had previously
imagined.
So I adopted his rules (or at least some
and for some time): I used a Leica with
a 50 mm lens, never empoyed artificial light,
never interfered with what I photographed,
never reframed my original shots. Marc Riboud
once told me that for the closer disciples
the rules were even stricter: about how
to wrap black scotchtape around the Leica,
in order to make it less conspicuous, how
to organize one's camera bag, etc.
Some of us became good and even famous photographers
– but not many of our photos could
be mistaken for his. Because his secret
lies elswhere. Only now – being much
older myself than he was when we first met
– I begin to understand.
It's like Zen Buddhism – in which
he believes – or Japanese archery,
which he often mentions. Or like T.S.Eliot's
"teach me to care and not to care".
Conscious attention to geometry helps to
an unconscious approach of subject matter
– i.e. to an approach free of intentions,
like the journalistic intention of "telling
a story".
I remember my disappointment, in the early
Fifties, when Life published a whole issue
of his photographs from the Soviet Union
– the first ever taken by a Western
photographer. What they showed was neither
the Soviet paradise, nor the Soviet hell:
just ordinary people, like us, working,
dancing, sitting in the sun. Now I understand
that this was a much deeper statement than
anti-Communist (or Communist) propaganda
would have been.
This is why, in my opinion, HCB is the greatest
photographer of the 20th century –
and also the most misunderstood (which is
possibly an attribute of greatness).
The photograph "Derrière Saint-Lazare",
about which I have been asked to comment,
is a good example of this kind of misunderstanding:
many people get ecstatic about the coincidence
between the leap of the man and the dancer
on the poster. To me this is not the main
point: what makes this a great photo is
of course the "geometry", but
even more the "subject matter",
which is a complex relation between several
stories and feelings, that cannot be expressed
by words: if it could – what would
be the point of photography?
Frank
Horvat, Cotignac, July
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