Post by PeterW on Feb 20, 2011 16:16:42 GMT -5
Hi gang,
In the thread “1st Roll” I posted a piece about Henri Cartier-Bresson and mentioned a long television interview with him I watched some years ago.
Thinking back, there were two interviews, shown one after the other, one by the BBC and one by a French television company. I wish I had recorded them, but I didn’t, so the words I have put in quotes may not be the exact words Cartier-Bresson used, but they’re close, the best I can remember after 12 or 14 years.
I much preferred the interview by the BBC. I can’t remember who the interviewer was, but he established a rapport between himself and C-B before he started asking questions, and C-B himself seemed much more relaxed. The French interviewer got far too esoteric for me, and kept wandering off the subject.
What I recall about C-B talking about “The Decisive Moment” is from BBC interview.
Cartier-Bresson spent a short time thinking about the question before answering, and then said that at any time during which something is happening there is just one moment, sometimes just a split second, that expresses, exactly and concisely, what is happening. That was what he called the decisive moment.
Capturing that moment with a camera required two things of the photographer, a sense of composition so that the “moment” happened in the right place in the picture, and a sense of anticipation, being able to visualise in advance what the moment would be, and being ready for it when it came.
The interview was illustrated with a number of C-B’s pictures, and he was asked to comment on them.
One, which has often been reproduced, was his picture of a young boy walking up a narrow street in Paris carrying two large bottles of wine.
“I knew he was proud to be entrusted with collecting the wine for his family’s dinner, but as he approached his face was expressionless, useless for a picture that would tell a story. There would be no moment to record. When he reached the exact position I wanted I gave a whistle to attract his attention and for a moment as he looked up, his pride showed in his expression, as I had hoped it would. That was the decisive moment of the picture”.
Another was C-B’s well-known picture of a man in silhouette leaping across a lightly flooded area on a construction site. C-B said the composition was all wrong because the man was leaping out of the picture instead of into it. Also, the man was out of focus. But it was undoubtedly a decisive moment
C-B spotted this picture through a gap in the fencing surrounding the site and had no time to compose a shot or to focus. “I anticipated that he would leap from the end of the plank he was on, and the decisive moment would be just as his foot was about to touch the water but hadn’t yet disturbed it. The whole thing was over in a few seconds, but I knew I had captured the moment I wanted, the moment that expressed everything that was happening”
Moving on to his commissioned portraits, which are very seldom published, the interviewer showed a portrait of a lady, I forget who, and asked C-B how he anticipated and caught on film the “decisive moment” that showed the lady’s character so well.
C-B said that he always went to someone’s house for a portrait session, never a studio, because he wanted his subject to be relaxed in familiar surroundings. He always used available light, never flash or floodlights, which he said were intrusive.
He would place a chair for the sitter so that the light from a window gave the lighting he wanted, and then another chair for himself in the position he wanted to be.
“I always had two cameras round my neck,” he said. One empty and one loaded with film. I would talk for a long time with the sitter, talking about anything I thought might interest him or her, and watching for gestures and expressions in the answers.
All the time I would play with the unloaded camera, often pretending to take a picture with it so the sitter got used to my playing with a camera and got to ignore it.
“Then I would pick up the loaded camera and carry on talking. I would look for the start of something, a small hand gesture, or a smile”. He said that a genuine smile always started at the eyes. You could see it coming if you knew the signs. The decisive moment of a smile was just before it reached the mouth, before it became the false, practiced smile of the film actress. That was the moment I wanted to capture. I could anticipate it and was ready for it.
“So the decisive moment is one you anticipate and wait for?” the interviewer asked.
“Sometimes , yes,” C-B agreed . “In a lot of street photography, or photojournalism, you sometimes get plenty of time to choose and frame your picture, and maybe wait for something or somebody to move into the empty space you have left in the composition.
At other times you get no warning, or perhaps only half a second warning. Miss that half-second warning and you have missed the moment. You have to be alert, constantly framing a composition, watching and trying to anticipate all the time.
“I have many more failures than successes. Some years ago I sat down with a box full of my negatives and the proof prints and went through them. It was taking forever to sort them out, so I took a pair of scissors, snipped out the negatives I thought were worth keeping and put them in a biscuit tin. The rest were crap, so I threw them away. I learned afterwards that I made a big mistake.”
“You should have kept them?” the interviewer asked.
“No, no”, C-B said. “As I said, they were crap, I had missed the moment. My mistake was to cut out individual frames of 35mm film. This made the job of the printers at Magnum much more difficult. I should have left one frame each side of the ones I wanted to keep.”
PeterW
In the thread “1st Roll” I posted a piece about Henri Cartier-Bresson and mentioned a long television interview with him I watched some years ago.
Thinking back, there were two interviews, shown one after the other, one by the BBC and one by a French television company. I wish I had recorded them, but I didn’t, so the words I have put in quotes may not be the exact words Cartier-Bresson used, but they’re close, the best I can remember after 12 or 14 years.
I much preferred the interview by the BBC. I can’t remember who the interviewer was, but he established a rapport between himself and C-B before he started asking questions, and C-B himself seemed much more relaxed. The French interviewer got far too esoteric for me, and kept wandering off the subject.
What I recall about C-B talking about “The Decisive Moment” is from BBC interview.
Cartier-Bresson spent a short time thinking about the question before answering, and then said that at any time during which something is happening there is just one moment, sometimes just a split second, that expresses, exactly and concisely, what is happening. That was what he called the decisive moment.
Capturing that moment with a camera required two things of the photographer, a sense of composition so that the “moment” happened in the right place in the picture, and a sense of anticipation, being able to visualise in advance what the moment would be, and being ready for it when it came.
The interview was illustrated with a number of C-B’s pictures, and he was asked to comment on them.
One, which has often been reproduced, was his picture of a young boy walking up a narrow street in Paris carrying two large bottles of wine.
“I knew he was proud to be entrusted with collecting the wine for his family’s dinner, but as he approached his face was expressionless, useless for a picture that would tell a story. There would be no moment to record. When he reached the exact position I wanted I gave a whistle to attract his attention and for a moment as he looked up, his pride showed in his expression, as I had hoped it would. That was the decisive moment of the picture”.
Another was C-B’s well-known picture of a man in silhouette leaping across a lightly flooded area on a construction site. C-B said the composition was all wrong because the man was leaping out of the picture instead of into it. Also, the man was out of focus. But it was undoubtedly a decisive moment
C-B spotted this picture through a gap in the fencing surrounding the site and had no time to compose a shot or to focus. “I anticipated that he would leap from the end of the plank he was on, and the decisive moment would be just as his foot was about to touch the water but hadn’t yet disturbed it. The whole thing was over in a few seconds, but I knew I had captured the moment I wanted, the moment that expressed everything that was happening”
Moving on to his commissioned portraits, which are very seldom published, the interviewer showed a portrait of a lady, I forget who, and asked C-B how he anticipated and caught on film the “decisive moment” that showed the lady’s character so well.
C-B said that he always went to someone’s house for a portrait session, never a studio, because he wanted his subject to be relaxed in familiar surroundings. He always used available light, never flash or floodlights, which he said were intrusive.
He would place a chair for the sitter so that the light from a window gave the lighting he wanted, and then another chair for himself in the position he wanted to be.
“I always had two cameras round my neck,” he said. One empty and one loaded with film. I would talk for a long time with the sitter, talking about anything I thought might interest him or her, and watching for gestures and expressions in the answers.
All the time I would play with the unloaded camera, often pretending to take a picture with it so the sitter got used to my playing with a camera and got to ignore it.
“Then I would pick up the loaded camera and carry on talking. I would look for the start of something, a small hand gesture, or a smile”. He said that a genuine smile always started at the eyes. You could see it coming if you knew the signs. The decisive moment of a smile was just before it reached the mouth, before it became the false, practiced smile of the film actress. That was the moment I wanted to capture. I could anticipate it and was ready for it.
“So the decisive moment is one you anticipate and wait for?” the interviewer asked.
“Sometimes , yes,” C-B agreed . “In a lot of street photography, or photojournalism, you sometimes get plenty of time to choose and frame your picture, and maybe wait for something or somebody to move into the empty space you have left in the composition.
At other times you get no warning, or perhaps only half a second warning. Miss that half-second warning and you have missed the moment. You have to be alert, constantly framing a composition, watching and trying to anticipate all the time.
“I have many more failures than successes. Some years ago I sat down with a box full of my negatives and the proof prints and went through them. It was taking forever to sort them out, so I took a pair of scissors, snipped out the negatives I thought were worth keeping and put them in a biscuit tin. The rest were crap, so I threw them away. I learned afterwards that I made a big mistake.”
“You should have kept them?” the interviewer asked.
“No, no”, C-B said. “As I said, they were crap, I had missed the moment. My mistake was to cut out individual frames of 35mm film. This made the job of the printers at Magnum much more difficult. I should have left one frame each side of the ones I wanted to keep.”
PeterW
